How long would it take to tweet the entire history of US drone strikes one by one? Josh Begley, a graduate student at New York University, thought he would only need 10 minutes.

I'm going to tweet the entire history of US drone strikes tomorrow. 10 years in 10 minutes, starting at 12pm. Follow @dronestream for more. — Josh Begley (@joshbegley) December 11, 2012

Tuesday at noon, he started tweeting out every single drone strike the US has ever carried out in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia using his newly created Twitter account @dronestream. In each tweet, he also included a link to the source of the information on every single strike. The history of American drone strikes that he started chronicling goes as far back as November 3, 2002.

Nov 3, 2002: In the first known US targeted assassination using a drone, a CIA Predator struck a car, killing 6 (Yemen) news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2402479.s… — Dronestream (@dronestream) December 11, 2012

Initially the strikes were sporadic — sometimes between each strike a few months went by. But then they became more frequent — and sometimes deadlier.

Jun 17, 2004: The first known fatal US drone strike inside Pakistan killed 6-8 people, including 2 children (Pakistan) nytimes.com/2004/06/19/int… — Dronestream (@dronestream) December 11, 2012

Jan 13, 2006: 18 civilians, including 6 children, were killed when a US Predator fired on 3 houses (Pakistan) nytimes.com/2006/01/15/int… — Dronestream (@dronestream) December 11, 2012

Oct 30, 2006: 80-83 civilians, including 69 children, reported killed (Pakistan) thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDet… — Dronestream (@dronestream) December 11, 2012

Aug 27, 2009: A US missile strike from a drone aircraft Thursday killed at least 8 people (Pakistan) google.com/hostednews/afp… — Dronestream (@dronestream) December 11, 2012

Begley wanted to show how drones strikes developed over the last 10 years. By the 10-minute deadline, he had sent only 54 tweets and corresponding strikes, nowhere near the 354 strikes the US has carried out overall, according to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Alright, I lied. Too many strikes to tweet. @dronestream is going to take a lot longer than 10 minutes. — Josh Begley (@joshbegley) December 11, 2012

When pressed, Begley told Mashable that having failed "is kind of the point." However, he said that it wasn't actually intentional — he really wanted to do it in 10 minutes. "I would be interested to see the whole thing play out in 10 minutes and I may still try to do that," Begley said.

Begley created the project for "Narrative Labs," a class taught by Douglas Rushkoff at NYU. The purpose of the class is to tell stories using real-time platforms like Twitter.

Data for the tweets came from information compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which collects various news sources for every reported strike. Begley said he's trying to go through all of them, and choose the article that seems most accurate to use as a link. Once he's done that, he has to condense that information into 160 characters.

All the vetting and writing is done manually, but since there are so many strikes, he tried to have some tweets ready to go. "I tried to compile as many as I could before noon today," he tells Mashable. "But I'm doing as I go right now. I'd like to bring people into that process of going through it."

This isn't the first time Begley has used this methodology. His first project, "Racebox," looked at how racial identities were defined in each US census since 1790. Begley explained that as he was going through the research for that project, he thought: "OK, maybe other people might want to look at it too."

Since then, he's tried "to get into some research and then trying to figure out a way to share little bits of it along the way." The idea is to make his research open-source and engage the audience.

SEE ALSO: Dronestagram Reveals the 'Real Places' Hit by U.S. Drones

Begley already made headlines at the end of August when he designed an iPhone app to track US drone strikes called Drones+. Apple rejected the app three times, ultimately defining it as "objectionable" and "crude."

"The main question from the drone app that I think has found its way to this small project is this idea of access to data, and even if we have access to the data, do we really want to be interrupted by it?" says Begley. "Do we really want to follow an account that's going to tweet every drone strikes since the first one in 2002? Or do we maybe want follow it for half an hour and then unfollow it? What is the threshold for us to be interrupted by these kind of stories? I think that's the main question."

Begley is still tweeting drone strikes as this story is published, and he told Mashable he hopes to be done by the end of the day.

Photo courtesy of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems.