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Tag: 2009

Afghanistan and its Election on Twitter

Erhardt Graeff

Link

http://www.webecologyproject.org/2009/09/afghanistan-and-its-election-on-twitter-the-macro-picture/

Summary

  • 111,741 tweets about Afghanistan and its presidential election posted between August 11, 2009 and September 9, 2009
  • 11,255 tweets on August 20, 2009, the day of the election
  • 29,642 users talked about Afghanistan in our dataset
  • Top 10% of tweeters contributed 65% of tweets (same as Iran Election)
  • Number of retweets for a user was not correlated to their tweeting volume (same as Iran Election)
  • 483 hashtags were used at least 3 times
  • No single, dominant hashtag (differs from Iran Election)
  • 3 most used hashtags: #Afghan09, #Afghanistan, and #AfghanElection

Web Ecology Project Twitter Scraper and Database Schema

Erhardt Graeff

Re-wrote Ruby Twitter scraper to be more efficient and designed and implemented a normalized database schema for storing tweets on Web Ecology Project’s server.

Revision History

Original Twitter scraper prototype was coded in perl by Ethan Zuckerman (mentioned in a blog post on Apr 13, 2009). The script used Twitter’s URL-based API (since changed) to scrape tweets from a simple search query on a particular term like a hashtag. The script was ported to Ruby by Web Ecology Project member Dave Fisher, who also set up the initial database.

I re-wrote Dave’s code to make the scraper more efficient in how it handled the initial scraping of tweets and in writing to the database. I also designed a database schema for the tweets which organized the various metadata connected to each tweet in specific tables and columns that could be indexed for faster and easier queries across Web Ecology Project’s growing dataset.

Use

My code was used to collect the tweets used in two studies I co-authored, Detecting Sadness in 140 Characters and Afghanistan and its Election on Twitter, and in another study authored by my Web Ecology Project colleagues, The Influentials.

Reimagining Internet Studies

Erhardt Graeff

Link

http://www.webecologyproject.org/2009/08/reimagining-internet-studies/

Excerpt

“Our field poses two simple questions to researchers:

  • ‘Where have studies about the web failed?’ and,
  • ‘How can we do better?’

“The emerging field of Web Ecology is an attempt to unify contemporary research and practice under a common focus, set of principles, and general approach to promote new insights and more fruitful forms of exchange in this space. We believe that these lay the groundwork for a more vibrant, more dynamic, and more useful field of research and community of researchers.”

The Awesome Foundation

Erhardt Graeff

Founding Trustee of The Awesome Foundation, started in July 2009 in Boston.

Details of Work

  • Responded (1 of 10) to Tim Hwang’s initial call for trustees
  • Designed Awesome Foundation drop cards
  • Represented Awesome Foundation at many events and in local media
  • Pushed for expansion of the Boston chapter in October 2011 to double the number of trustees and try offering two $1000 grants per monthOngoing
  • Participate in monthly deliberation meetings to choose grant winners
  • Contribute $100 to a $1000 grant given by our chapter each month
  • Help orient new chapters and trustees

Coverage