If you’ve been visiting the TwitterTrails website, maybe you’ve already noticed this new feature (linked on the top navigation bar).

We’ve created a form for the public to use to request stories for the TwitterTrails team to investigate.  You’ll find it here: http://twittertrails.wellesley.edu/~trails/stories/request.php

Although TwitterTrails is not yet open for the public to create accounts and investigate stories on their own, we’ve create a form so anyone can submit a request for a story to us.  If we find a story interesting and generating discussion on Twitter, we’ll create the story for you, and email you back with the results.

To investigate a story for you, we need the following information:

What kind of story is it?  Are you investigating a claim, or do you want to examine an event being discussed on Twitter, like a hashtag or a trending meme?  Or does your inquiry not fit under either of those categories?

What is the story?  A brief (at most one sentence) description of the story you are investigating.  What’s the claim? What event or hashtag are you tracking?
Examples:
Claim: Malia Obama is pregnant
Events & Memes: #AlexFromTarget

What should we search for?  The real trick to getting a good picture of a story on Twitter is choosing the right search terms.  “Going from the information need to the query.”

This is easy if you’re investigating a trending event or hashtag, where you would use the hashtag or name of the event as a search term.

Claims are a little trickier, especially when they are not generating a lot of discussion on Twitter.  Take the following claim from Snopes: A photograph shows Sarah Palin posing in a U.S. flag bikini while holding a rifle

If we wanted to investigate this on TwitterTrails, what kind of search terms would we use?  A search term like “sarah palin” would be too vague and bring up a lot of irrelevant results (unless the claim was being very widely discussed on Twitter).  The best way to hone your search terms to bring up the most relevant results is to use Twitter’s Search: https://twitter.com/search-home

If we search just for “Sarah Palin” we find, as expected, irrelevant tweets:

“Sarah Palin” is too popular a search term, and people are discussing things about Sarah Palin unrelated to our claim. Let’s refine our search a little more, and try “Sarah Palin bikini”:

These tweets still don’t seem relevant to the claim we are investigating (though we found the tweet from @snopes).  If we refine it a little more, to “Sarah Palin bikini rifle” we begin to get some relevant results:

So, one of our search terms could be “Sarah Palin bikini rifle.”  We could try some permutations of this as well, such as “palin bikini gun” or “palin bathing suit gun” to get more results.

Also, be careful to note that Twitter’s Search API only allows us to retrieve tweets from the last 6-9 days (although you can see older tweets on the web search), with the exception being if in the last 6-9 days someone retweets an older tweet.  Expect to get less results on a story that people haven’t been discussing in the last week.

To send you your finished story, we also need your email address!  We will not share your email address with anyone.

There is other information you can give us, such as the URL to a tweet you are investigating, more information about the story, or non-English keywords to capture tweets that express doubt.

So, if you find any stories you’d like us to investigate with TwitterTrails, use our new form to request it, and we will create a story for you!