By Jeremy Dibbell

Back in late May I wrote a post here titled “Was JQA a Tweeter?,” in which I noted a visitor’s observation of the similarities between John Quincy Adams’ line-a-day diary entries and the micro-blog posts produced on Twitter. Well, that got the wheels spinning here at MHS, and when we realized that JQA begins a long series of line-a-day entries on 5 August 1809 as he departs on his voyage to Russia (where he would serve as the first American ambassador), we decided some opportunities are just too good to pass up.

So, beginning on 5 August 2009, we’ll be posting JQA’s line-a-day diary entries on Twitter, one per day exactly 200 years later. You can check out the project at http://www.twitter.com/JQAdams_MHS, and if you use Twitter too we hope you’ll follow along and receive the daily updates. We’ll be posting JQA’s exact words (his entries really do work perfectly as 140-character tweets), and where possible we will augment the posts with maps showing his location (thank him for providing regular latitude and longitude readings), links to longer diary entries, and other information. His short entries are surprisingly rich, full of wonderful details about his reading, meals, weather, and shipboard activities.

This is an exciting opportunity for us to test out some new technological tools (and to create a transcription of the line-a-day diaries, which will be useful for future projects as well). We certainly hope others will find JQA’s journey as fascinating as we do, so please follow him on Twitter, and feel free to send me any feedback you have on the project (beehive@masshist.org).

[Note: the image included here, which you’ll also see as the background of JQA’s Twitter page, is his drawing of a ship from the inside back cover of his second diary (1780)]