Security or Uncertainty: Stabilizing R-Shief Twitter Analysis during the Jasmine & Egyptian Revolutions

It has been a profound few weeks in the Arab world to witness, especially as an Egyptian-American. A couple of us (namely myself and code developer Christopher Morton) have been working relentlessly to get R-Shief‘s Twitter Analysis onto a stable network environment  so we can continue to data mine and aggregate all Twitter posts with the hashtags #Jan25, #Tunisia, #Wikileaks — among others — and make them available for future research. Our next steps include (a) to implement semantic content analysis software, and (b) to begin a series of visualizations that succeed at conveying the influence Twitter has had over the recent historical events in the Arab world. I argue that Twitter and its surprising political usages are important. Most recently in Tunisia, Egypt, and other parts of the Arab world, they have created an interplay between the application of structure and resistance that has been transformative.

View Publication