A dynamic network visualization of the Egyptian revolution on Twitter

Now that the spectacular Egyptian revolution is sort of over (and as the even more dramatic Libyan uprising is raging), social scientist are scrambling to collect the data and to explain what happened. In this case – and mostly likely, for many future revolutions -, because of the widely reported role of social media in the revolution, getting data on the revolution is easier than ever, because much of the communication and social interaction was  recorded in real-time on the servers of Facebook and Twitter.

The YouTube video below is a first result of this type of research, showing a visualization of the network of retweets with the hashtag “#jan25” right before and after the resignation of the Egyptian president Mubarak. André Panisson of the  University of Turin collected the data and created the animation. As he writes on the project website, the results are very preliminary; the data collection is not even complete. Nevertheless, it gives a nice idea of what you can do with such data. The project page also has a nice static zoomable map of the network.

Substantively, I don’t find the video very informative yet, primarily because we know nothing about the identity of the nodes, and because the layout of the network is somewhat awkward. We see a swarm of small components floating around in the middle, with the giant component somehow draped around it, probably as a result of the order in which nodes arrived. This mostly obscures the structure of the giant component; it would have been much easier to see with the giant component in the middle. Still, we can recognize a tree-like structure in the emerging giant component,driven by what seems to be a textbook case of preferential attachment. Another substantive problem with this analysis is that although it shows a lot of tweeting, this all happened after the most interesting phase of the revolution, which is is the period leading up to Mubarak’s resignation.

But of course this is all very preliminary, and in any case very cool to look at. I hope to see much more of this, hopefully with some more theoretical underpinning. Online social media not only changed the face of revolutions, but also of social movements research.