Mapping #Kony2012 on Twitter (Part II)

Following on from our last post about mapping #Kony2012 on Twitter, we also wanted to offer up a map that shows the proportion of tweets from each country that made reference to the viral video or the LRA leader (or both).

We've already seen that most tweets referencing Kony were published from North America, and Western Europe, but this map tells a slightly different story. We now see that despite the very low total amount of content coming out of Sub-Saharan Africa (see the map below or read this post about where tweets come from), there is indeed a significant amount of focus on the Kony issue there.

But it remains that this is still a discussion that was largely taking place online in the Global North. While the top five countries in our sample (20% of all georeferenced tweets between March 5 and March 13, 2012) are: (1) USA; (2) Brasil; (3) Indonesia; (4) UK; (5) Mexico; and (6) Malaysia, the top five in terms of tweets that reference #Kony are: (1)USA; (2) UK; (3) Canada; (4) Brasil; and (5) Ireland.

In other words, we see that while Twitter itself contains a lot of voices from the South, the discussion of Kony and Invisible Children remained firmly in the North.

***
Below are also included a couple of maps showing the total number of tweets published during the same period:

Announcing SheepCamp

Thank you all for your interest in SheepCamp.  We are now officially announcing this is a reality. 

Working with Big and User Generated Geographic Data

(aka SheepCamp)

 (gratuitous Photoshop opportunity, there will be no bales of hay involved)

Pack your laptops, sleeping bags (not necessary but feel free to bring one), and data as Sheep Camp 2012 will be held on the University of Kentucky's campus on June 15-17.  We will be meeting in Keeneland Hall, a residence hall at the university that has recently been renovated with meeting spaces, high speed WiFi and break out rooms. Attendees will stay in dorm rooms (single occupancy) with a shared bathroom with one other room. The cost is $26 per room per night and we ask non-students to contribute to this cost if possible. Graduate students will have their lodging covered. We're also hoping to cover a lot of the travel expenses for graduate students as well but to be eligible for this please contact Matt at zook@uky.edu.

We are encouraging those of you coming from New England, New York, DC, Pennsylvania, and the Mid-west to carpool.  We have set up a message board to try to organize carpools here: 
Carpool to SheepCamp Lexington

Our preliminary schedule is as follows:

Thu (June 14): Arrivals (as they happen)

Fri (June 15):   Bourbon Distillery tour (early afternoon)

                          Arrivals (as they happen)

                          Welcome dinner

                          Al's bar or West 6th Brewpub for lightning talks, (maximum 90 mins total)

 Sat (June 16):  Welcome message/meeting over breakfast,

                           Keynote/agenda setting talk

                           Skills workshop(s)

                           Lunch (informal discussion of theory)

                           Group project work

                           Dinner

                           Reconvening for some sort of un-conference type activity

                           Note: The  exact topics will be developed by the participants over the next several weeks.  But the general idea is to set up a research agenda for using and analyzing user generated geo-coded content.  

                  

Sun (June 17):  Breakfast. 

                           Group activity / Group presentation. 

                           Lunch / Awards (people start leaving)

                           Un-conference / Fun / Skills workshop(s)

We've been in contact with most of our confirmed attendees (who registered an expression of interest), but if you are interested in joining us and haven't been in touch, please email zook@uky.edu.

The geolinguistic contours of digital content in Spain

Following up on our post about augmented realities and uneven geographies, we wanted to post a few more maps that came out of the project.

This first one compares content indexed in Spanish (Castilian) to content in Catalan. Throughout much of the Catalonian region in the Northeast coastal areas there is considerably more content in Catalan than in Spanish.

The second compares content containing the word "love" in English and Spanish. The map reveals that while the Spanish term is much more predominant overall, there are clusters of locations along the Mediterranean coast at which there are more references to the English word.

These agglomerations are centered in tourism regions of Costa Brava, Costa Blanca, and the Andalusian coastline and closer inspection reveals that these concentration of hits are tied primarily to tourism related references to hotels, restaurants and other activities that are target to non-Spanish visitors.

One key thing that this map does then is reveal how the audiencing of augmentations can be alternately directed to a range of groups: ranging from the highly local (e.g. interpersonal relationships) to the global (e.g. tourist sites).

You can read more about the methods we used and our full conclusions in our new paper: "Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies: Exploring the Geo-linguistic Contours of the Web."

O Mundo Pela Wikipédia

Some of our work just got picked up by the Brazilian magazine Exame.

The spread offers an alternate visualisation to the data that we're collecting about the geographies of Wikipedia. It also includes penguins. None of us speak Portuguese, so we're not sure what the penguins have to do with Wikipedia. But, being the purveyors of sheep that we are, who are we to talk?

A PDF of the piece is here.

Matt, Monica and Ate Talking about IronSheep

Check out the new video produced by the UK College of Arts and Sciences of Matt, Monica and Ate talking about the IronSheep 2012 event.



p.s. It's not our fault Matt's name is spelled wrong.

Videos of Sheep

During IronSheep we played a series of sheep videos in the background to provide a certain "ambiance" to the event. It seemed a waste not to share them so here they are (along with a few other videos we've since discovered or been sent).

Baaaaaahhhhh!


Sheep replicating the Game Pong, the Mona Lisa and Fireworks

Sheep Surfing

Monty Python - Flying Sheep

Where do Tweets come from?

Last week, we posted a map of all georeferenced tweets mentioning the #Kony video. The patterns were interesting, but not entirely unexpected.

A more interesting question though, would be to see what percentage of all tweets from each country reference #kony, in order to get a better sense of how focused people were on the event. However, to do that, we need to figure out how much content in Twitter actually comes from each country.

Mark and Devin Gaffney collected all georeferenced tweets sent between March 5 and March 13 (it is important to point out that we are only dealing with a very small percentage of total tweets here [less than 1%], and so there may be significant geographic biases in where/how people georeference their content). We then took a random 20% sample of that dataset: giving us about 4.5 million tweets that we spatially joined to countries. The results are below:

(countries are on the x-axis)

The bar chart shows us the degree of inequality in where this content is coming from: with people in a few countries producing the bulk of content, and then a very long tail of countries from which very little content is produced.

Interestingly though, it is not just the usual suspects that are producing the bulk of content. The top six tweeters are:

(1) USA
(2) Brasil
(3) Indonesia
(4) UK
(5) Mexico
(6) Malaysia

Only two of the countries on that list are in the Global North and traditional hubs of the production of codified knowledge. What does this all tell us then? It is possible that Twitter is truly allowing for a 'democratisation' of information production and sharing because of its low barriers to entry and adaptability to mobile devices.

However, we need to do more work in this area to really figure out where content is coming from in the platform. Our sample in this post was limited, and more importantly we are still only dealing with georeferenced tweets that make up less than 1% of the total content that passes through the platform. An interesting start nonetheless.

**We'll post the Kony map normalised by the number of tweets in each country soon.