Sure, Twitter has its problems. Big problems. But once in a while we rise to the occasion. The passing of beloved writer Ursula K. Le Guin was a poignant moment where people shared their favorite quotes on Twitter. Here are the top 25 most retweeted ones. The details of how this list was generated are included at the end of this post.
https://twitter.com/davemakes/status/955932631350181888
https://twitter.com/Vallmeister/status/955944526568308736
https://twitter.com/LettersOfNote/status/955934579868819456
https://twitter.com/magpiekilljoy/status/955937681397157888
https://twitter.com/sarahmccammon/status/955934622763945984
https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/955933094615240704
https://twitter.com/MykeCole/status/955957238304256000
https://twitter.com/lauraolin/status/955930423833571329
https://twitter.com/MW_Unrest/status/955940838147854336
https://twitter.com/Rrrrnessa/status/955933781755613184
https://twitter.com/parisreview/status/955937440962895879
https://twitter.com/eoin_dara/status/955930636346363904
https://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/955948316851916800
https://twitter.com/LAReviewofBooks/status/955929587824787456
https://twitter.com/RobGMacfarlane/status/956065612098351105
https://twitter.com/leverus/status/955980965322657792
https://twitter.com/parisreview/status/955927982673219584
https://twitter.com/haymarketbooks/status/955934254021709826
https://twitter.com/goodreads/status/955939329393782784
https://twitter.com/23cschwartz/status/955935794912428033
https://twitter.com/RuffneckRefugee/status/955936438771765248
https://twitter.com/TheScofieldMag/status/955929751796895744
https://twitter.com/JamesGleick/status/955952267970121728
https://twitter.com/kekduckett/status/955933201968566287
https://twitter.com/_b_e_n_c_/status/955928603383906304
The data was collected using the open source twarc utility using a search query of “Le Guin”. This found 251,287 tweets between 10PM GMT January 24 and January 14. The top 100 retweets were collected using twarc’s retweets utility. I went through by hand to see which were quotes, and eliminated subsequent duplicates as I went, to find the top 25.
Twitter don’t allow the tweet data to be shared on the open Internet but they do allow the publication of tweet identifier datasets. You can find the tweet ids for these UKLG tweet here at the Internet Archive. You can use twarc’s hydrate command to turn these back into JSON or CSV data.