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A day in the life of twitter (with the same limitations in terms of what its recording) has been mapped by Chris McDowell here: http://sciblogs.co.nz/seeing-data/2010/11/25/mapping-a-day-in-the-life-of-twitter/ ________________________________________ From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce D'Arcus [[log in to unmask]] Sent: Friday, 4 March 2011 5:41 a.m. To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Critical use of Blogs as research data On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 4:25 PM, Muki Haklay <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > While there are all sort of ways to 'mine' or 'mechanically process' information from twitter, blogs and other sources, this should be done with a lot of caution and awareness to who is participating and all sort of biases. > > First, all these media is suffering from 'participation inequality' which means that few people contribute a lot, while most people contribute very little - and because of the big numbers or the size of the contribution from the vocal sources, you notice them more than the others, multiple but much more quieter voices. > > Second, there is a gender imbalance in some sources - blogs for example, but also in Wikipedia contribution, OpenStreetMap mappers (my pet subject) or twitter. > > Third, the digital divide or just digital ignorance means that you will notice the voices of the affluent and not people who are poor. > > Fourth, there is some tendency for clustering around similar points of view (best demonstrated in the climate change bloggosphare with little connection between camps). > > Fifth, you're exluding voices that are confident in verbal communication but don't feel secure in their writing. > > There are other factors ... > > So just use critical thinking when you approach such sources - a lot of the current analysis glosses over these biases. All of this is great, but it doesn't actually us very far in terms of concrete data sources to critically analyze. The volume of data we're talking about with something like twitter is pretty astounding. For sake of argument, say I want to know something pretty basic, and that in and of itself isn't that interesting, but might offer fodder for further exploration: in the two week period after January 24, 2011, where did tweets originate with the hastag #jan25? What are the patterns of retweets? Can I do that? If yes, how (technically)? I don't want to clog peoples' inboxes. If anyone wants to pick this up off-list, or on twitter, feel free. Bruce