Occupied with Place: Exploring Twitter Resistance Networks

Abstract

From Tehran Square to Gezi Park, Twitter is an emergent tactic of protestors in the public square. Our work utilizes the theoretical framework of contentious politics and its human geographic extension as a framework for examining the role of "place" in Twitter-based networks of resistance. We examine Twitter traffic about local instantiations of Occupy Wall Street across eight cities. The study addresses mutual communications between Twitter participants in hashtags related to each of these local instantiations. This work explores the role of place as a constitutive component of these networks. To do so, we employ descriptive statistical and chi-square tests to examine the significance of user-defined metadata regarding place to the exchanges between users within a network. We conclude that place matters and point to future directions in computational and traditional qualitative analysis, spatial-temporal studies of social media, and the effects of locational propinquity for network development.

Building protest online: engagement with the digitally networked #not1more protest campaign on Twitter

“…these hubs account for 32.9% of reciprocated ties. This results in a pattern that resembles a hub and spoke network, similar to findings in other studies Hemsley & Eckert, 2014).…”

Twitter use by politicians during social uprisings

“…According to a study conducted by Barberá and Metzger [3], in a single day, at least 2 million tweets using hashtags related to the protests, such as #direngeziparkı, #occupygezi or #geziparki have been sent, most of it from within Istanbul. As it is asserted, Twitter plays an important role for the protestors in public sphere in conveying their messages to the peers and to the whole world [22] [6].…”

Geographic information science II

“…But it also requires relevant place-based digital data that can be used in developing these concepts and methods. The advent of VGI and the big geosocial data deluge have meant the emergence of new sources of place-based data (Miller and Goodchild, 2014, Hemsley and Eckert, 2014a, 2014b, Quesnot and Roche, 2014. While Elwood et al (2013) argue that the palatial nature of these data present an important opportunity for developing platial GIS, realizing this platial perspective in GISciences faces two main issues.…”