I spent a few hours this morning using a stats package to look at my tweets since 2008. A large peak caught my eye, so I dug a bit deeper into the day “2010-11-21”.

Apparently, on the day that Ireland agreed to a rescue package from the IMF/EU (21st November 2010) I tweeted 41 times - the most tweets in a single day. I remembered sitting here in New York watching the press conference online. I was tweeting and responding to people in Ireland. I was pretty upset and disappointed - things at home just seemed to be falling apart.

In a previous project, I saw that the most coverage Ireland had ever received in the New York Times was in the same month, November 2010. The coverage of Ireland’s bailout in the New York Times dwarfed coverage of the peace process, tourism, sports, day to day politics.

I had no idea that two peaks from these two unrelated projects would align. I was reminded how useful it is to have some understanding of how to work with data. I get a sense that these abilities will be even more relevant in the future as we try to draw together a sense of our lives and our histories using data; we’ll need to know how to draw on memory, privately held data, personal public data (like our tweets) and news sources to add context and perspective - drawing it all together to gain insight.  I’ve said this before, but today’s coincidence just made it feel much more real.