Archiving the journal of knowledge

Attempt to download some previous tweets before deleting an account.

Some time ago I made a journal parody account on twitter called “The Journal of Knowledge” (circa 2018). The account has been inactive for years, and I’m deleting it.

In preparation to delete the account I made a data request to twitter, but I’m not sure what data I get before I close the account. I recently got the rtweet package working, so I’m going to find out if I can use it to download the old posts.

library(rtweet)

auth <- rtweet_app()

JOKE_timeline <- rtweet::get_timeline(user="journal_O_K",
                              n = 200,
                              token = auth)

saveRDS(JOKE_timeline,"journal_of_knowledge.RDS")

That pulled all 173 tweets from the account into a data frame, and I saved it as an .RDS file so I can load it later. But, this did not download any of the pictures of the fake journal abstracts, and that is what I want to archive.

There’s a function for screenshotting twitter posts, maybe I can use this.

JOKE_timeline$id_str[3]
mgk_img <- tweet_shot(JOKE_timeline$id_str[3], zoom = 3, scale = TRUE)
magick::image_write(mgk_img,"test.png")

No, that function was deprecated.

Need to roll my own.

# get urls for images to download
media_urls <- c()

for(i in 1:173){
  media_urls[i] <- JOKE_timeline$entities[[i]]$media$media_url
}

media_urls <- media_urls[is.na(media_urls) == FALSE]

# download all the images into folder

?download.file

for (i in 2:length(media_urls)){
  f_name <- tail(unlist(strsplit(media_urls[i],"/")),1)
  f_path <- paste0("images/",f_name)
  
  download.file(media_urls[i],f_path)
}

I think I got what I wanted. Now, I just need to delete some stuff, and then maybe share a few Journal of Knowledge abstracts for posterity.

JOKE abstracts

There were 68 abstracts posted on the account, and I was able to download all of them. Here’s a few of them.

What is the answer to this question? It depends

Blah blah is special: No it isn’t

The population is aging

To the tune of…

Journal of Feelings

Dressing up research results