1. Social Media,
Social Change
‘Twitter brings you closer’: seeing the little data in the Big
Data up close
Farida Vis
University of Leicester
@flygirltwo

2. Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
2005: Flickr

3. Fitna: The Video Battle
2008: YouTube

4. Reading the Riots on Twitter
2011: Twitter

5. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
Rob Procter (University of Manchester)
Farida Vis (University of Leicester)
Alexander Voss (University of St Andrews)
[Funded by JISC]
#readingtheriots

6. data
data
unstructured

7. Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
2005
235 posts – 106 individuals
(Flickr)
Manual collection possible

8. Fitna: The Video Battle
2008
1413 videos – 700 individuals
(YouTube)
+ Computer Science

9. Reading the Riots on Twitter
2011
2.6 million tweets – 700K individuals
(Twitter)
+ Lots of Computer Science

10. Lots of people involved! Paul Lewis
READING
Jonathan Richards
Alastair Dant
Katie Loweth
THE RIOTS
Marta Cantijoch
Yana Manyukhina
Mike Thelwall
Steven Gray
ON TWITTER Rachel Gibson
Andy Hudson Smith
Rob Procter (University of Manchester)
Farida Vis (University of Leicester)
Alexander Voss (University of St Andrews)
LOTS OF
[Funded by JISC]
CODERS

11. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER What role did social media play?
2.6 million riot tweets (donated by
Twitter)
700,000 individual accounts
Importance of empirical evidence
Initially:
o Role of Rumours (misinformation)
o Did incitement take place? [no –
#riotcleanup]
o What is the role of different actors on
Twitter?

12. READING
Role of Rumours
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER

17. voice of reason tweet
@pigsonthewing: “May I remind clueless/
hysterical #birminghamriots commentators
that children’s Hospital sits face-face with
city’s central police station”

58. Not ‘just’ pretty data visualisations
On the ground application
(crisis communication – lots of
interest) + crisis mapping
Potential of cross fertilisation
Data journalism + analytical insight ->
Turbo charged #ddj +
open tool access = important

59. Dick Costolo (Twitter CEO):
‘He created this installation that was at the Tate
museum in London a while back and the installation
was these hundreds of thousands of ceramic hand-
painted sunflower seeds... And as you stood back from
the room it looked like this sea of just stones that were
black stones that were spread across the floor and of
course you couldn’t really tell what they were. But as
you got closer it looks like, you can start to tell ‘ooh it
looks like they’ve stamped out hundreds of thousands
of sunflower seeds and spread them across the floor’.
But as you pick them up you started to realise that they
were all individually shaped and painted differently and
unique and beautiful and distinct in their own right. So
that’s what we want to bring to what we’re building: the
ability to shrink the world and allow everybody to see
each other.’

60. So that’s what we want to bring to
what we’re building: the ability to
shrink the world and allow
everybody to see each other.’

62. Twitter data as sunflower seeds?

63. Turing’s Sunflowers
+
BIG DATA

64. Role of algorithms and BIG DATA
#littledata in the BIG DATA
CONTEXT CONTEXT CONTEXT!!!

65. The The Art
Space Gallery
Twitter

66. The monetary value of the seeds (£3.50)
The monetary value of Twitter data
DataSift
GNIP
Dataminr

67. Social Media ≠
Social Change (causality)
Political struggle
People

68. Reading the Riots
on Twitter tools
Coming to you soon
For free

69. @flygirltwo
‘Twitter brings you closer’: seeing the little data in the Big
Data up close
http://futureeverything.org/research/publications/futureeverybody/