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Visualization of Egyptian Revolution On Twitter 53

Posted by CmdrTaco from the revolution-will-not-be-televised dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A visualization of the network of retweets with the hashtag #jan25 at February 11 2011, at the time of the announcement of Mubarak's resignation, is available. The data was collected using Gephi connected to the Twitter Streaming API, converting the users and retweets to nodes and edges in a dynamic network. Though the data represents only approximately 10% of the retweets, it's interesting to see the large flow of interconnected retweets in just one hour." I've attached the video if you want to watch it.

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Visualization of Egyptian Revolution On Twitter More

Visualization of Egyptian Revolution On Twitter

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  • Interesting? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    it's interesting to see the large flow of interconnected retweets in just one hour

    I think the visualization of a slashdotting is more interesting.

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by cayenne8 ( 626475 )
      Am I the only one out there that is getting a bit bored with the 24/7 coverage of this?

      I mean...sure it is important...mostly to people on that side of the world, but man..enough is enough. Gotta be something new that's newsworthy...

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Desler ( 1608317 )

        But...but...this is totally different because it involves Twitter!!! Twiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitter!!!!

      • Re: Interesting? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Yvan256 ( 722131 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @11:55AM (#35211370) Homepage Journal

        May I suggest listening to "Why Does This Always Happen to Me" by Weird Al Yankovic?

      • Re: Interesting? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Kvasio ( 127200 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @12:02PM (#35211456)

        Stop whining. Now you have to pay your dues for the 4-year live feed of "internationally significant" OJ Simpson trial. (Outside USA he was relevant only as an actor in The Naked Gun trilogy, still not justifying complete lack of any other programming on CNN 'International')

      • Re: Interesting? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Morty ( 32057 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @12:46PM (#35212110) Journal

        Am I the only one out there that is getting a bit bored with the 24/7 coverage of this?

        I mean...sure it is important...mostly to people on that side of the world, but man..enough is enough. Gotta be something new that's newsworthy...

        Egypt is a regional power, and a significant US ally. It's literally undergoing a democratic revolution. The revolution has been mostly peaceful. The revolution has significant implications to long-term US interests. And the revolution has been extremely rapid.

        There are plenty of other things going on. But for once, I'm with the news people: this is huge, this is newsworthy, and this is worth following.

        • "Egypt is a regional power, and a significant US ally. It's literally undergoing a democratic revolution. The revolution has been mostly peaceful. The revolution has significant implications to long-term US interests. And the revolution has been extremely rapid."

          Right you are.

          And I was made aware of that by all the coverage easily by the 2nd day of the 24/7 coverage of it.

          I could easily track the progress at this point by a blurb on the crawler at the bottom of the screen.

          It was news at first..but hone

        • The revolution has been mostly peaceful.

          I know you said "mostly", and maybe it is when compared to how many people were there and how long it lasted, but tell that to the almost 300 dead and 3000 injured. But I agree...completely news worthy, even to nerds.

      • yeah, because Mz Aguilera botching the US Nat'l Anthem or who won the Grammy's is waaaay more important that ongoing revolution.

        seriously, when it's again time to vote in this country, please do us a favor and stay home watching American Idol.

        • "yeah, because Mz Aguilera botching the US Nat'l Anthem or who won the Grammy's is waaaay more important that ongoing revolution."

          Not saying that...just that I "got it" after the 1st 24 hours of coverage.

          Egypt's revolution, while good for it's people (if they can keep going towards democracy)...really has little effect on my life...so, why am I having to be inundated by constant live coverage. I'm sure there are domestic issues that do directly affect me that I'd be more interested being kept informed abo

          • You know they have this really cool thing now-a-days called "local news" You can usually find it on the television, in the newspaper or if you're REALLY lucky on a local news network's website.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You have to understand this from the perspective of the Obama administration. He's been rightly criticized for his inept and often contradictory foreign policy messages. His lapdogs in the news media are trying to give him every chance to get out in front of this story and look like he supported the Egyptians' freedom all along, even though it was barely 2 years ago that Obama took his apology tour to Cairo and praised Mubarak. The Egyptian people rightly see Obama as playing political calculus and backi

      • I mean...sure it is important...mostly to people on that side of the world, but man..enough is enough. Gotta be something new that's newsworthy...

        In coming decades, I think you're going to realize that the middle east power change happening now is one of the more significant things you've seen in your life. Sorry if you're bored by it, but it's been a long time coming.

        • In coming decades, I think you're going to realize that the middle east power change happening now is one of the more significant things you've seen in your life.

          How so? I mean, aside from possible energy issues...how else will it affect my life?

          I mean..I don't give a fuck about all the arabs and jews over there. I don't care how they live or govern themselves or what god(s) they pray too. If it weren't for the oil over there, honestly I can't image the US would have fuck to do with them over there at all

          • How so? I mean, aside from possible energy issues...how else will it affect my life?

            Are you under the assumption that, right now, what happens in the middle east does not affect your life? Do you realize that a very large portion of our military is currently deployed there? If military deployments don't affect you or your family at all, then consider yourself lucky. There have been any number of events that happened over the last 30 years in the middle east which directly affected people's lives here, and most are due to instability. That includes things like the Islamic revolution in

            • Frankly...if it wasn't for us needing oil over there...I'd be all for puling completely out, and letting them all blow themselves up. Wouldn't not bother me a bit...

              The only reason I give a shit about the middle east, is that the US needs the oil over there.

    • it's interesting to see the large flow of interconnected retweets in just one hour

      I think the visualization of a slashdotting is more interesting.

      It looks like this: Network Error (tcp_error) A communication error occurred: "" The Web Server may be down, too busy, or experiencing other problems preventing it from responding to requests. You may wish to try again at a later time. For assistance, contact your network support team.

  • Question (Score:4, Funny)

    by Even on Slashdot FOE ( 1870208 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @11:51AM (#35211284)

    What is this visualization supposed to look like? I get the impression of of a fertilized egg growing several layers of cells, but I'm unsure that is the intended effect.

  • It looks like some Artificial Intelligence from a SF movie.

  • What does it mean? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @12:15PM (#35211638)

    In order to convey useful information, the following would have been helpful:

    • A legend or other explanation of what the dots and links represent.
    • A running clock. Better yet, an animated timeline with critical events marked.
    • Some indication of the age of a 'link' (tweet?). I have no way of knowing whether a pair of dots linked together represents a single message and the individuals subsequently ceased communications or persistent messaging over a period of time.

    That said, this may seem to be pretty pointless to the average Slashdotter. But I'm betting that sociologists and intelligence services are looking at ways to glean information from just such information graphs. Identify the retweet source nodes geographically and we could see if this was an organized 'astroturfing' or maybe send the secret police to those locations.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      A legend or other explanation of what the dots and links represent.

      From TFA

      "Nodes are twitter users, and links appear between the nodes A and B when B retweeted a message of A containing the hashtag #jan25".

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Zbor ( 1997102 )
      Very interesting. What program did you use to create such graph?

  • so simple (Score:3)

    by hey ( 83763 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @12:16PM (#35211644) Journal

    It looks so simple... makes you wonder why more countries don't have Twitter revolutions /s

  • Revolution... in the sense that Egypt has one of these mobs-in-the-street things every so often. What comes around comes around again.

    Democratic... in the sense of replacing one dictator with the military rallied on by the power elite.

    Internet... in the sense that the first job of any twit/facebooker is to sit on his ass and read about something, repeat it, then think he had something to do with it.

  • Viral (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It almost looks like a (bad) bacterial contagen. Talk about going viral! Know that your data are being analysed by spook houses the world over. ..."How an insurrection or revolution occurs over social media 101"... I liked how at one point the data went slow-motion to better highlight the number of connections happening all at once.

  • How can one conditionally attach a file based on the relative receptivity of the recipient, especially with multiple, unknown recipients? I think it's an erroneous statement. It should read "I've attached the video whether you want to watch it or not."
  • This seems entirely uninteresting. The only obvious conclusion you could draw from this data is that reaching a major milestone in a major social event triggers a major outburst of communications, which seems trivially obvious. For some interesting analysis on #jan25 tweets, see for instance this [bit.ly], an attempt to visualize influence levels between twitter users. It is interesting to note that there are relatively few highly "influential" tweeters, many of whom were arrested or detained at some point during th

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