Abstract for Senior Thesis
#IranElection: quantifying online activism
In a retrospective analysis of the Iran national election protests, the subsequent social media blitz, and the meteoric rise of the Twitter platform as a purported tool of dissidence, much focus has been put on directly studying the impact of the internet on the event. Classically, researchers from all fields tangential to “Web Science” face a profoundly difficult and recurring problem with internet studies, however: in practice, it is hard to directly measure the impact of ICT’s _ on a given social/political situation, given ICT’s ethereal structure. Realizing this, authors such as Burns and Eltham _(2) tend to employ methods that approach analysis through an “at a distance” approach, which seem to focus primarily on systemic, macro-level aspects such as regime, social structure, and civil society, and the actors generalized roles within them.
In previous studies, this would have been an acceptable compromise. For example, in the oft-cited case study of the 1999 WTO Protests, some of the best data came from interviews with the protestors themselves (3). Without hypothetical means to “Google” for germane e-mails and relevant websites, or the means to make “API requests” to AOL for all instant messages related to the case, there was little that could be done.
With Web 2.0, this changes: with API requests, convergence of publishing platforms and protocols, and increased abilities to search out information, the distance a researcher must study their subject from is decreasing. Programming interfaces, such as Ruby on Rails, make it manageable for amateurs to collect and analyze data sets.
In the specific case of the Iran election, another unique situation unfolded; since the bulk of apparent internet activity took place within Twitter, by leveraging the application’s API, researchers could then, theoretically, capture and analyze the entire conversation to begin to answer, quantitatively, what role the internet played in the crisis.
In current work, we have collected 766,263 tweets related to the Iran election (4), and codified various general metrics (total tweets, re-tweets/user, total tweets per day/hour) to determine answers about the specific nature of the conversation surrounding the protests. Using more sophisticated methods of analysis, we can begin to understand the patterns and paths of influence through the network via “re-tweet influence maps (5)” and word frequency charts that generalize contextual information in the messages. We can identify directly measurable, quantifiable statistics about the conversation, and begin to understand the role of the internet in major sociopolitical events at a much finer granularity.
This of course is currently bound to the Twitter platform, but the lessons here are applicable anywhere in Web Science; with the program that has been developed specifically for Twitter, expanding it for RSS, Youtube/Google API, and Facebook is a relatively trivial matter; only a question of resources.
Notes
- Information and Communications Technologies, which is a generally accepted way of describing the explosion of communication infrastructure in the late 20th century, but can also apply generally to any form of communication technology; the printing press as well as routers would be ICT’s in this form.
- One of the only published papers to come out about the Iran Election so far, in a recent conversation with the authors, it became clear that the at-a-distance approach was used specifically because of a lack of quantitative information and analysis.
- For more information about this particular case, the WTO History Project produced by the University of Washington is home to the archived interviews, which are quite astounding; the interviewers asked each interviewee about the role of the internet, which makes for a useful data source for Web Science.
- These were collected by Ian Pearce and myself from June 14th, 2009 to October 24th, 2009, with the vast majority of data coming from late June and early July. The only parameter used was to search for all tweeets employing the “hashtag” category #iranelection.
- A re-tweet influence map is created by tying every parent (who is being “re-tweeted”) to every child (who is “re-tweeting”) at a uniform t-step (in this case, hours), then shifting the t-step on a graph to see the flow of information over time.
Various Works
Bennett, W. Lance. “Communicating global activism: Strengths and vulnerabilities of networked politics.” Cyberprotest: New media, citizens and social movements. (2004): 124-146. Print.
Burns, Alex and Eltham, Ben (2009) Twitter Free Iran: an Evaluation of Twitter’s Role in Public Diplomacy and Information Operations in Iran’s 2009 Election Crisis. In: Communications Policy & Research Forum 2009, 19th-20th November 2009, University of Technology, Sydney.
Smythe, Elizabeth, and Peter J. Smith. “New Technologies and Networks of Resistance.” Cyber-Diplomacy: Managing Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century. (2002): 48-82. Print.
“WTO History Project.” WTO History Project. 16 Jul 2003. University of Washington, Web. 18 Nov 2009. <http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/index.htm>.
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