Thursday, August 06, 2009

John Quincy Adams, Early Geotwitterer


In a story that integrates a few of my favorite things (geospatial information, Twitter and history), the New York Times discussed the discovery of some of John Quincy Adams' ship logs from a trip across the Atlantic in 1809. Ever so brief, Adams' diary notations fit the description of 'microblogging,' most of his log entries were under 140 characters. And of special note: whenever possible, Adams' documented his latitude and longitude in his 'post.' From yesterday's article:
"Jeremy B. Dibbell, an assistant reference librarian at the society, said a graduate student at Simmons College here saw the diary a few months ago in the society’s archives and thought it looked like a Twitter feed, though written in Adams’s meticulous script and bound in leather."

Follow along on the sea voyage of John Q. Adams here on Twitter. I guess someone should geolocate those tweets as they are posted...

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