As we study Twitter more and more, we see that they've made an effort to expose numerous details of the social network. They've parsed the Tweet to extract hashtags and user mentions, they've carefully organized the media. This makes a great deal of analysis quite simple.
On the other hand, some parts of the analysis are still quite difficult. The actual topic of a Twitter conversion is just a string of characters. It's essentially opaque until a person reads the characters to understand the words and the meaning behind the words.
Understanding natural-language text is a difficult problem. We often assign it to human analysts. If we can dump the related tweets into a single easy-to-read document, then a person can scan it, summarize, and decide if this is actionable intelligence or just background noise.
One of the truly great counter-intelligence missions is Operation Mincemeat. There are many books that describe this operation. What's import about...