Visualisation – Frontline Club

“Brief and largely transatlantic”: Visualising #Kony2012 on Twitter

Frontline Club — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 12:10:15 +0000

Yesterday at the Frontline Club, there was a discussion about Invisible Children’s controversial Kony2012 video.

Whatever else you think about it (and a lot of people have a lot of thoughts), the campaign has succeeded in raising awareness of the crimes of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony.

I just thought I’d take the opportunity to flag up this visualisation by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute tracking the spread of the campaign on a number of related Kony hashtags on Twitter during March:

Mark Graham at the OII concludes:

"#Kony’s moment of visibility was both brief and largely transatlantic. This Western-centric pattern of information flow is not necessarily surprising and can be found on many other online platforms. However, given the video’s relevance to East Africa, and the global diffusion of Twitter (e.g. Indonesians form the world’s 6th largest population of Twitter users), we might have expected #Kony to have a slightly less clustered geography."

Worth checking out the original post on the Zero Geography blog at the OII for more details.

Visualised: A day in the life of Twitter

Daniel Bennett — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 10:39:15 +0000

Continuing an inadvertent theme on the blog, I’ve just come across this visualisation of a day in the life of Twitter by informatics researcher Chris McDowall:

Mapping a Day in the Life of Twitter from Chris McDowall on Vimeo.

It’s worth viewing in full screen, in HD, on Vimeo as you can see some of the fainter spots lighting up around the world.

Among other places, the map clearly highlights the popularity of Twitter in Indonesia.

There are waves of activity in the USA in the middle of the night on 18 November 2010. An East Coast wave occurs just before 08.00 GMT, a Midwest one just before 09.00 GMT and a broader sweep including the West Coast just before 10.00.

McDowall says these are caused by "an automated Twitter service that tweets local news for specific ZIP codes".

There’s more about the technical background on McDowall’s blog.

Visualising the Egyptian revolution through Twitter

Daniel Bennett — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:39:12 +0000

"I was very lucky to get this data", André Panisson tells us. He made the serendipitous decision to perform a test run of a Python server that would collect Twitter statuses around a particular hashtag on 11 February – the day that President Mubarak announced he would step down in Egypt.

The following video documents the "dynamic network construction" of Twitter users as they retweeted other Twitterers adopting the hashtag #Jan25 for an hour before, during and after Mubarak’s announcement.

On his blog, Panisson doesn’t offer a great deal of interpretation about what he thinks his data shows. I think I’d be guessing! And it seems from comments on the blog that you can’t read too much into the visualisation itself because it is in part "a direct effect of using the Force Atlas layout".

There’s another interesting visualisation of Twitter influencers during the protests on Kovas Boguta’s blog. He does offer more analysis of his Influence Network graphic suggesting that there is an intermediary group of influencers who connect journalists, NGOs and "foreign policy types" to activists on the ground.

It seems to me that this group plays a similar role to "bridge bloggers", or "bridge figures" who are able to illuminate and mediate the concerns of one culture to another through their experience of both.

Boguta also notes that the protesters willingness to tweet both in Arabic and reach out to the rest of the world in English was a key difference from Iran in 2009. In the latter case, he suggests that "connections between those in Iran [who were tweeting in Persian] and the rest of the world were very thin and easily severed".