Introduction

#shakeass15 is an archive of tweets associated with the 2015 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, to be held in Vancouver, Canada, April 1-4, 2015. More information about the schedule of the conference can be found on SAA's website. You can browse tweets by dates, people, and the other options listed at the top of this page. You can also explore this archive through this TAGSExplore visualization of conversations.

The #shakeass15 hashtag is indeed now the official hashtag of the conference. It began in 2013 as a joke solution to the ongoing confusion about what a useful hashtag for the conference could be, in light of no official statement on this and the obvious #saa variant already actively in use by the Society of American Archivists. A handful of active tweeters quickly spread its usage, even to the amusement of non-conference-goers. (And, yes, we did make t-shirts.) By the time the SAA decided it should embrace tweeting, the #shakeass hashtag was already well established, and they have embraced it.

TAGS Viewer allows users to browse, explore, and search a Twitter archive. As a backend, it requires Martin Hawksey’s Twitter Archiving Google Sheet (TAGS). TAGS provides a free, non-technical method of archiving tweets for a given hashtag, which can be particularly useful for capturing a conference’s backchannel.

This viewer was developed by the Modern Language Association. The application is contained in a single HTML file and has no server dependencies, which makes it easy to host anywhere. Read more about this project at Github or download a zip file of the latest version. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.