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Saturday 19 February 2011

The Egyptian Connection


This infographic shows the Egypt Influence Network.  Twitter uses are said to influence each other if they follow each other.

A larger view of this graphic shows this with the lines, as this close up demonstrates.


Users are placed near the other users that they influence and individual user size represents their influence across the entire network.

Given the dual languages used in most tweets, English is in blue and Arabic in red.

The analyst and designer is Kovas Boguta, the head of analytics at Weebly. According to the author the choice of language is a vital element. No doubt Arabic was used  more for on the ground mobilisation and English to spread the word beyond the country's boundaries.

"For me, the point is that the activists are cooperating with the west, on their own terms and in a constructive way...in fact that is a key element and what allows this much bigger exoskeleton to tightly interface to the core. This is in contrast to what happened in Iran 2009...where the connections between those in Iran and the rest of the world were very thin and easily severed."

" The lump on the left is dominated by journalists, NGO and foreign policy types; it seems nearly grafted on, and goes through an intermediary buffer layer before making contact with the true Egyptian activists on the ground" - Kovas Baguta

Here is another piece of research put online that relates to the very recent Egyptian revolution. It is a preliminary result of the network of retweets with the hashtag #jan25 at February 11 2011, at the time of the announcement of Mubarak's resignation.

Your username is possibly  in this network if you  re-tweeted someone, or have been re-tweeted.



The data were collected through the Twitter streaming and search APIs by AndrĂ© Panisson, and is part of a research project involving the Computer Science Department of the University of Turin , the Complex Networks and Systems Group of the ISI Foundation and the Informatics department of Indiana University.
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1 comment:

Unknown said...

Translating Twitter into more languages
http://blog.twitter.com/2011/02/translating-twitter-into-more-languages.html

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