A few weeks ago, over the course of 15 days, I gathered 52,080 tweets about learning to code. I did this with TCAT, the open source tool that our library uses for Twitter archiving. I gathered all tweets that matched any of three popular learn to code hashtags: #codenewbie, #learntocode and #100daysofcode.
What I learned is that libraries and librarians aren’t very involved in the learn to code conversation on Twitter. Searching the results for the word “library” turned up 138 mentions (or 0.265% of tweets). This sounds like a modest contribution, but in fact only 17 of these were about libraries as institutions (0.035% of tweets), while the rest were about software libraries. “Librarian” only turned up in two results (0.004% of tweets).
What does this mean? First of all, I feel that 52K tweets is a decent sample size. Second, libraries and librarians are not well represented in this conversation. While launching learn to code initiatives is often good publicity for libraries, I think this data suggests that our profession is not really following through.
