Tweeting to Disaster

I, to make a bad joke, ran across this article this morning about the upcoming 100th Anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.  The History Press has launched a new Twitter account to chronicle the days leading up to and including the faithful night that the UN-Sinkable ship sank in the waters of the North Atlantic.

You can follow the timeline through the hashtag #TitanicVoyage (@titanicrealtime), and even from some of the people that were a part of the launch like #crew, #engineering, #captain to hear their thought and accounts of the events that led up to that now infamous night of April 15, 1912. Currently the timeline was setup on March 10, 2012 to begin the chronicling of the events.  There are just a few tweets out there now from the captain, crew, engineering and officer but as the time gets closer to the launch date we should start seeing the timeline fill up.  Currently there are almost 13k followers of the site.

This could be a great lesson starter for you Social Studies classes where the students can follow along with the feed as things are happening to see what it would have been like if Twitter was around during that time for people to be able to send out updates as they were happening.  We find it so often now with other natural disasters that we are getting updates from Tweets faster than we can get news crews into areas.  It will be very interesting to see how things unfold through tweets over the next month.  Maybe to see if there will be tweets coming from what would be passengers as well as the crew for their thoughts on what will, or rather has happened.

** Update **
I just got some new information that I needed to add to this post.  The information that is being Tweeted out is, and will be coming directly from the ships log books.