info vis final paper olga paraskevopoulou

8/4/2019 Info Vis Final Paper Olga Paraskevopoulou

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MA in New Media and CultureInformation Visualization project

Final paper

Olga Paraskevopoulou

Student No: 6248217

[email protected]

Politwittic: visualizing tweets about the 2011 provincial elections in

The Netherlands

Introduction

The Politwittic project emerged from a four month, multi-disciplinary,

academic collaboration and research. The main research interest that drove the project

was the exploration of how digital, aggregated data can be visualized meaningfully in

order to provide insights for a specific event. The focus of our project moved towards

visualizing user-generated content about the provincial Dutch elections that were held

on March 2nd

and Twitter was chosen as our source of digital information.

This paper will conceptually discuss aspects of the project and will argue why

Twitter may prove to be a rich source of data concerning a current event, such as, the

provincial elections. It will provide background information about the emergence and

proliferation of microblogging practices and attempt to review in more detail the

research possibilities that stem from the exploration of data collected from Twitter

providing examples of existing information visualization projects. It will furthercontextualize the Dutch elections explaining why they were of specific importance



and will make connections to the US elections which have provided various examples

of how digital sources of information may be harnessed and visualized providing

different perspectives to view the information that surround us.

Throughout our research process we were interested in discovering what is left

unseen in the fast-paced process of communication on Twitter and in finding ways to

structure, leverage and communicate those findings to a wider audience. For that

purpose, our research team built an interactive information visualization prototype

and named it Politwittic. This prototype is visualizing content of tweets related to the

provincial elections demonstrating the evolution of topics of interest over time, as

well as, the number of users engaged in the conversations and their connections

through the practice of retweets.

Social media and politics

Politicians have been experimenting with online communication to engage in

new forms of dialogue with their constituents. In March 2007, the Guardian in Britain

was the first to notice the link between Twitter and politics reporting that the US

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards was an early adopter of Twitter.com

(Uskali, 2009). Since then, the successful use of social media in the US presidential

campaign of Barack Obama has established online social media as integral parts of

the political campaign toolbox. More precisely, as a result of the 2008 campaign,

Twitter has become a legitimate communication channel in the political arena.

However, as it is often noted, with thousands of people engaging in online

conversations it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to follow the development

of the topics discussed.

Visualization is a powerful tool for breaking down complex information and

understanding data. Used in the field of politics it can provide unprecedented means

for leveraging transparency in the governmental affairs but also can be used as a tool

for communicating meaningfully information about historical or current political

events and debates. The 2008 US presidential elections were the first to be visualized

in an excessive way. Data sets derived from varied sources -official, historical, real-

time or user-generated- like political websites, campaign material, polls, statistics,



different candidates are exploiting the medium, and apart from visualizing the

frequency and density of Twitter feeds it also makes visible who tweets and why . It

could, for example, answer the question whether the candidates are using the medium

to interact in real time with the voters or just to send our their message. However, the

attempt to visualize this buzz results in a rather noisy interface. The user has to read a

lot of information of how the system works and also has to change different modes to

get the information that she is possibly interested in. In addition, although access to

the real tweets is made possible it is not realized in a very practical way.

Undoubtedly, the domain of politics is a realm where there is growing interest

in exploring digital, user-generated content, such as Twitter bursts and reactions about

political events. Although the US has led the way to this exponential growth and use

of data related to politics and elections, other countries are also starting to explore this

field. The Netherlands may not have yet a wide collection of visualizations focusing

on elections, but such efforts are expected to become the norm as there is more and

more attention given to real time data sources and content shared online.

For example, for the Provincial Elections on the 2nd

of March,

the Statalyze2 website provided a political barometer based on tweets from various

parties. In addition the website politiekentwitter.nl3, is providing a platform for

aggregating tweets from over 750 politicians and journalists which mainly focus on

political content. Politicians with Twitter accounts are invited to sign up and have

their tweets published on the website. This initiative aims in keeping track of the

politicians activity on Twitter and also provide a means for people interested in

politics to get updated information, participate in the discussions and have access to

an archive of political tweets ordered by the name of the party they represent. Also,

there in an ongoing interest in open data and access to information to foster

transparency and knowledge, as for example, The Network in Transparency and

Impact in Development4.

2

http://www.statalyze.com/hashtags/politiek/ps2011/ 3 http://politiekentwitter.nl

4 http://openforchange.info/



Is this interest in online user-generated content justified? Are Dutch politicians

and citizens tweeting their thoughts? In a study carried out by comScore5

in April

2011, it is revealed that “the Dutch social networking market continues to grow

strongly as sites like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin extend their respective

footprints in the market”. In particular, in their press release it is stated that more than

one in four Dutch Internet users visits Twitter during the course of the month and that

The Netherlands have the highest penetration in Twitter usage amongst all countries

followed by Brazil, Japan and Indonesia.

Although the numbers delivered by this study reinforce assumptions about the

enormous possibilities accompanying this wide adoption, there is a strong belief that

party leaders are using Twitter as an "old politics" send-medium, that they hardly

interact with the voters and that they are just sending out their message. The most

active social Twitterer, the politician actually answering most of the questions

received, is the party leader of the Dutch Party for Animals (a small party). Some of

the bigger parties are reluctant to answer questions. The Dutch Labour leader, for

example, answered none of 245 questions received, and the Dutch right wing leader

Geert Wilders of the PVV only answered one of 378 questions asked via Twitter. In

general it is thought that Dutch politicians are sending out a message rather than

interacting. However, the voters are on Twitter and that was, for instance, clearly

demonstrated when the most recent debate on TV was discussed so much on Twitter

that it became a worldwide trending topic.

Despite the presence of websites dedicated to Twitter feeds, the high

penetration of micro-blogging practices in The Netherlands and the evidence of dense

activity on Twitter, to our knowledge, there is no indication of projects focusing on

visualizing this information. For instance, although the politiek en twitter website is

tailored around the political use of the Twitter service it does not make any efforts to

analyze further this data apart from categorizing it under the different names of the

parties. The only project that was found related to the Dutch elections is an online

interactive data visualization of the election results and local statistics for Dutch

5http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/4/The_Netherlands_Ranks_number_

one_Worldwide_in_Penetration_for_Twitter_and_LinkedIn



municipalities6. This lack of further investigation and insight in the proliferating

online data and more specifically on Twitter, was one of the main reasons that

motivated the researchers to try to deal with that void.

The Politwittic project focused on the visualization of tweets with political

content in order to investigate who and why is using Twitter and whether Twitter can

inform us about the political landscape in a specific two week timeframe that focused

on the week before and the week after the provincial elections (23rd

of February to 8th

of March 2011). In the following section, we will approach the rise of social

networking sites, and more precisely the case of Twitter, for examining to what extent

it may afford new possibilities for leveraging both the subjective experience and

objective observations, transcending barriers of social time and space, enhancing

collaborative knowledge, as well as, allowing both situational and abstract analysis.

Moreover, it will attempt to give examples why microblogging in general, but also,

more precisely, through the conversational practices that it affords, may provide a

valuable repository for user-generated content about specific events.

Twitter background: Giving voice and listening.

The term Web 2.0, coined by O’Reilly (2004), entails a certain set of qualities,

such as dynamic, user-centered, open, collectively intelligent and a certain set of web

technologies that facilitate easy publishing and content sharing, as well as the

establishment of social networks. It is usually understood as a large-scale shift toward

a collaborative and participatory version of the Web, were users are able to get

involved and create content (Beer, 2009).

Social networks are humming because they fit the spirit of the time, not

because they created the spirit of sharing (Skoler, 2009). They are about listening to

others and responding. Today’s culture emphasizes the importance of giving people

their voice but as the famous cybernetician and constructivist Heinz von Foerster has

claimed, “it’s the listener, not the speaker, who determines the meaning of an

utterance”. For that reason, our project aimed at listening to what twitterers’ had to

6 http://alper.nl/dingen/2010/06/dutchstats-%E2%80%94%C2%A0your-personal-atlas-of-the-

netherlands/



say about the 2011 provincial elections and building an interactive visualization that

would enable users to view, search and understand the voice of those tweets.

Twitter was born on 20067

but the exponential growth8

of its annual visitors

soon attracted the attention of scholars on this relatively new microblogging service

and research has tried to investigate Twitter as a platform of mediated inter-personal

communication. One of the first studies identified Twitter as a microblogging tool that

provide a light-weight, easy form of communication which enables users to broadcast

and share information about their activities, opinions and status (Java et al, 2007).

Twitter facilitate instant, online dissemination of short fragments of

information from a variety of official and unofficial sources (Hermida, 2010). The

research investigating the role of Twitter in social life is attempting to provide an

understanding about this microblogging usage, as well as, how it gives birth to

community structures. Java et al. have identified several categories of intention to use

Twitter: daily chatter, conversation, sharing information and reporting news. A

variety of research papers have approached the public timeline to see whether the

“Twittersphere” could reflect the formation of a new public sphere for debate, news

sharing and promotion practices or whether the majority of messages would be

“pointless bubble” (pearanalytics, 2009). Other approaches have investigated

conversational aspects and the possibility of collaboration by examining messages

addressed to specific users, retweets and followers.

Already in their preliminary analysis, Java et al. (2007), concluded that some

users were actually taking advantage of Twitter for informal collaborative purposes,

and conversation was an essential component of that. Huberman (2008) studied

further social interactions within Twitter as he was interested in how many people

each user communicated directly. In his findings he claimed the existence of two

different networks and that in order to assess the size of the social network that

matters it is needed to consider those people who actually communicate through direct

7 Business 2.0 disclosed that Twitter was created in two weeks during March 2006 in San Francisco.

The service is based on users' updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140

characters, which is why Twitter is called the “SMS of the Internet” (Uskali, 2009:16)8According to comScore during one year (April 2008 to 2009) Twitter quadrupled its US visitors

http://blog.comscore.com/2009/05/twitter_traffic_quadruples.html



messages with each other, as opposed to the network created by the declared

followers and followees. Thus, he concluded that what needs to be found is the hidden

social network as that is the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to

spread an idea, a belief or a trend.

In their research, Honeycutt and Herring (2009), focused on the functions and

uses of the @ sign and the coherence of exchanges in order to determine how well

Twitter supported user-to-user interaction. They revealed a surprising degree of

conversationality, that was facilitated by the use of the @ as a marker of addressivity.

Although, they also shed light on the limitations of the Twitter design at the time,

what was important in their findings was the fact that despite a “noisy” environment

and an interface that was not facilitating conversational use, short, dyadic exchanges

did occur relatively often, along to some longer conversations with multiple

participants.

Considering the fact that Twitter supports a variety of communicative

purposes and in continuation of researching conversationality on Twitter, Boyd

(2010), examined retweeting practices. In her findings it was made obvious that the

stream of messages provided by Twitter allowed individuals to be peripherally aware

of the occurring conversations without the need of direct participation to them. So

when conversations emerge, they are often experienced by broader audiences than just

the interlocutors. In that sense, the act of retweeting can be understood both as a form

of information diffusion and as a means of participating in a diffused conversation.

What also differentiates Twitter as a social medium, and for the researchers

adds value to its content and social structure, is that it has provoked creativity

through its constraints. Johnson (in Hermida, 2010), has described the service as an

example of end-user innovation as users have embraced the technology and its

affordances to develop conventions such as the use of #hashtags and the @user reply.

This structure was initially rough and inconsistent but Twitter developers have now

build the #hashtag convention, the @user reply and retweeting into the system making

it more easier for the users to keep track of the public timeline and social interactions.



Boyd (2010), has also mentioned another constraint of the platform as an

actual advantage. The mere fact of the 140-character limitation that enable the brevity

of messages allows them to be produced, consumed, and shared without a significant

amount of effort, allowing a fast-paced conversational environment to emerge. What

she also mentions is that through the varied approaches that users take to route around

these constraints, it is revealed what they value in specific messages and in Twitter as

a conversational environment.

Those findings amongst others, have provided us with a general understanding

of why and how people use these services but they have not explored the use of this

communication medium in specific contexts such as current events. The new Web 2.0

culture values sharing information, experiences, knowledge and voices or others.

Users are more involved in the news-creation process, where feedback happens in real

time and users have the opportunity to interact with each other (Stassen, 2010).

According to Skoler, using networks for the real value they provide means finding

ways to establish relationships and listen to others. In the case of Twitter, that would

require to spend as much time listening on Twitter as we do tweeting.

Learning what is happening: Twitter as an awareness system

The key question for our research was how could a better understanding be

gained of what is happening on Twitter. In other words, how could it be possible for

the voices of thousands of people to be represented and associated to real time events

and how could the temporal evolution of topics of interest be indicated. A way to

provide interpretations about the numerous tweets and gain further insight in the

discussions referring to a specific event, is undoubtedly information visualization.

Information visualization projects like the “A World of Tweets”9, provide a

more or less abstract overview of the volume of tweets disseminated worldwide in

real time. Although such an approach could be indicative of the wide spread use of the

medium and illustrate impressively the constant flow of the fast paced communication

that is occurring, as well as, its geographical density, however, it does not provide any

9 http://aworldoftweets.frogdesign.com/



insight for the context in which this communication is taking place nor a

comprehension of why and who is contributing to this global conversation.

A world of Tweets: screenshot taken on May 10th, 2011

Nevertheless, as it was argued before, microblogging may prove a valuable

repository of user-generated content that is worth to be further investigated. For that

reason, approaches that invest time in data mining and analysis may reveal and

illustrate how people are engaged in new communication patterns, communicating

their interests or with each other directly. In his weblog10

, Jeff Clark, has numerous

examples that demonstrate his avocation in “discovering patterns in the apparent

chaos of real life data and exploring new techniques for communicating that in a

visually compelling manner”.

With the latest tool that he has built, “Tweet Topic Exlorer”

11

, it is possible toinvestigate which topics are tweeted most often from a given ID. This information is

visualized with the use of clustered word clouds which use word size to indicate

frequency but also use positioning and word color to group highly correlated words

together. What makes this visualization even more interesting is that it also gives

very easy access to the raw data, the actual tweets that were tweeted from the

10 http://neoformix.com

11 http://tweettopicexplorer.neoformix.com/#n=NYTimes



particular account investigated. In this sense, the viewer has the opportunity to click

on a word of her interest and see the context in which this word was tweeted.

Tweet Topic Explorer (Jeff Clark, 2011): screenshot taken on May 11th, 2011

With an interest in revealing content about a specific event, the Politwittic

researchers investigated information visualization projects that addressed Twitter

content in relation to specific contexts. In that case, the term “specific context” is

understood as a current important event which may vary from being an international

sport event, a natural disaster to a political speech or elections, or any other large

event that may affect in certain ways peoples’ lives and that has some degree of social

significance. In all those cases, people who are watching, attending, engaging or even

dealing with these different kinds of events, they increasingly share via Twitter brief

and timely pieces of information. These may create an interesting repository of human

expression and could also lead to persistent conversations about those events. As it

has been noted, microblogging communities not only enable participants to share their

experience and shape how observers perceive an event, they are also used to help

participants influence the unfolding of an event and its outcome (Dork et al, 2010).

A lively interactive visualization of mentions on Twitter focusing on a very

specific event is provided by the Guardian. This visualization project collected tweets

about every game of The World Cup 2010 and tried to illustrate their content and

evolution during the time period of each game. On the bottom of the visualization the



viewer can also interact with the timeline provided to go back and forth on the time

lapse of the game and see in more detail, as well as, in relation to particular facts, like

yellow or red cards given to players, goals etc., how the content in those tweets

responded in an attempt to grasp, in a later stage, the spirit of each game. In the

screenshot illustrated above we can see how the words “ned” (The Netherlands) and

“esp” (Spain) are prominent in the content of the tweets. The viewer could easily

imagine that as the game was coming to an end and none of the teams had yet scored,

the fans must have tried to encourage their teams to make their last effort to win the

game.

The World Cup 2010, The Guardian 2010: screenshot taken on May 11th, 2011

However, for ordinary people trying to understand certain events by querying

services like Twitter, a chronological log of posts makes it very difficult to get a

detailed understanding of that event. Performing, for example, a Twitter search for the

most commonly used #hashtag produces a list of thousands of individual messages

that are not grouped or organized in any meaningful way. This inherent feature in the

microblogging platform is making it difficult to get an overview of the fast-paced

discussions as they happen in the moment as well as, how they evolve over time

(Marcus et al, 2011). Examples as the World Cup 2010, exemplify the need for some



sort of data arrangement that is required. Tweets have to be collected, structured,

analyzed and then presented in the most efficient way possible in order to offer a

valuable means of understanding and to be able to provide a certain degree of

understanding about how our collective mind reflects a specific event.

For the researchers, the importance of this data to be explored in the context of

a specific event, stems from certain characteristics of the service. More precisely,

from the emergence of this short, fast and effortless way of communication and the

real-time, light-weight and mobile use of the platform that enables instant updates that

capture user-generated content “at the point of inspiration”. What is more, Twitter has

the potential for direct relevance to our daily activities and to fit communication

practices into certain contextual cues. Context may not be the setting itself, but the

engagement with it, as well as the bias that setting gives to the interactions that occur

within it (McCullough, 2005). Perceptions may be subjective and fleeting, but

grounding life in effective contexts remains absolutely necessary.

Visualizing topics of interest, participants and evolution over time

The body of Twitter research is rapidly expanding from exploring its makeup,

norms and latent data to understand the service’s emerging social role and

conversational patterns. A particular branch of microblogging research analyzes

reactions to current events on Twitter. As it is fast becoming a critical source of

information about world events and there is an increasing interest to track these novel

microblog-based conversations by collecting, aggregating and visualizing tweets

about user-specified events as they unfold over a certain period of time. More

systematic approaches to capture this moment-to-moment pulse of the public

consciousness have inspired the research process and final visualization of the

Politwittic project.

Developed at the MIT, TwitInfo (Marcus et al., 2011), is a system for

visualizing and summarizing events on Twitter. The system tracks keyword mentions

on Twitter and turns them into timeline visualizations which summarize various

topics. In the project’s website the researchers present three feature topics and call for

the viewers to “Find out what Twitter things about everything”. In order for the



system to work, the user inserts keywords or #hashtags related to a particular event

and define the point of time. The system then identifies a set of tweets that correspond

to that criteria and provide an interface that facilitates exploring and understanding the

various points of interest (“sub-events”) in this input set. Systems like TwitInfo are

providing aggregate Twitter interfaces that promise a new set of exploratory data

analysis tools for not just to present data we already understand but to see something

in the data that we were not able to see before, to make discoveries, affect policy

making and communicating awareness.

The TwitInfo user interface. A) the user-defined name of the event, as well as keywords sent to the Twitter

Search API to log the tweets. B) The central timeline interface, with the y-axis corresponding to tweet

volume. Automatically-detected peaks (sub-events) are labeled with lettered flags. When the user clicks on a

peak, all the other interface elements filter to tweets in that time period. C) Event-related tweets with

geolocation are displayed on a map. D) Tweets for the currently selected event or peak (sub-event), colored

red if TwitInfo detects negative sentiment or blue if TwitInfo detects positive sentiment. E) The most

popular links in the currently-selected event or sub-event. F) Aggregated sentiment of all tweets in the event

or sub-event.

Twitter and political events: What is the #SP201112

discourse about?

“To understand something is called “seeing” it. We try to make our ideas ‘clear,’ to

bring them into ‘focus,’ to ‘arrange’ our thoughts.” (Card et al, 1999).

12The #PS2011, was the main #hashtag used for the 2011 provincial elections. Tweets collected for

our project included but were not restricted to this #hashtag.



Awareness is not only gained by looking around us and redefining our

relationship to objects in our vicinity. It is also gained by looking at information that

was once abstract, that had not any obvious spatial mapping, through creative and

intuitive new visual forms and presentations. However, the eyes need to be trained to

see, to decode the thousand words that one picture may worth, in order for people to

gain insight and to become aware. Recent trends in information visualization are

often advocating the benefits of using visuals to raise public awareness (Zambrano &

Engelhardt, 2008). In the same line of thought, what is found common in the

pioneering work of both Neurath and Rosling, is their passion to communicate data

and facts to the people in the most clear and effective way possible in order to educate

them and raise awareness.

Otto Neurath, was the founder of the Vienna Circle, and tireless advocate of

visual education. His claim was that with visual aids, one could create something that

is common to all, that could educate people in various countries. Neurath’s means of

spreading social knowledge were the pictorial statistics of the “Vienna Method,” later

coined ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Education). The information

visualization guru, H. Rosling has also dedicated his work in communicating real

facts to the world. He co-founded Gapminder, “a non-profit venture promoting

sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium

Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other

information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national

and global levels”.

Inspired by this pioneering work, the aim of the Politwittic project is not only

to visualize the online discourse about the elections, but it also aims to provoke users

to ask questions about the elections, make associations about the data presented to

them and help them see something that were not able to see before. What we are

interested in is not to provide a priori interpretations of the data we collected but to

enable users to make their own suggestions and discoveries.

Studies have confirmed that Twitter can indeed be a valid indicator of political

opinion and political deliberation (Tumasjan, 2010 & Koop and Jansen, 2009). In line

with this approach, the Politwittic research project attempts to built a timeline based



visualization for political events and more precisely for the 2011 Provincial Elections

in the Netherlands. The researchers intend is to provide an interactive visualization

dedicated to the online discourse that surrounded the elections and to engage users in

searching words of their interest and discovering what was said about them during the

examined time period. Through this exploratory process the user is able to track

occurring words and see their evolution over time, to find co-occurring words that

specify the context within which the word appeared and to see how many people

participated in the discussion.

Background of the 2011 Provincial Elections in the Netherlands

The members of the States-Provincial are chosen every four years. The

number of members of each States-Provincial depends on the size of the province's

population. Currently, the twelve States-Provincial number 566 members. As an

intermediary level between the state and the municipalities, the twelve Dutch

provinces have limited powers and largely carry out minor administrative duties and

serve as links between the top and lower echelons of government. Yet, the provincial

legislatures are responsible for electing the Senate or Eerste Kamer , which unlike

other indirectly elected upper houses, has the power to veto legislation. The current

Rutte coalition lacks a majority in the Senate, with 35 out of 75 seats. Provincial

elections, thus, carry a much more important national message despite the strength of

some local regionalist parties in certain provinces.

The Provincial elections were held on March 2, 2011. Turnout was 56%, up

from 46% in 2007 and was the highest turnout since 1995. The provincial election

results are widely seen as a referendum on Mark Rutte’s minority coalition between

his conservative liberal VVD and the Christian Democrats and supported by the PVV.

For that reason the cabinet was hoping to win most seats to be able to ease the process

of controversial legislation concerning mostly cuts in funding projects and stricter

laws. However, the alliance is set to fall short of an overall majority in the senate by

one seat, meaning it will be forced to rely on other parties to force through

controversial legislation, such as education cuts and anti-immigration measures. The

exact make up of the 75-seat senate will not be finalized until May 23, when the

provincial councils give their vote.



Considering the importance of the elections under these circumstances, the

evidence that the use of Twitter is widely adopted by the Dutch population and the

lack of previous attempts to visualize Twitter data, the researchers engaged

themselves in building an interactive interface that would allow a more insightful

view of the Twitter conversations surrounding the elections. As previously discussed,

the prototype is visualizing content of tweets related to the provincial elections

demonstrating the evolution of topics of interest over time, as well as, the number of

users engaged in the conversations and their connections through the practice of

retweets.

Some initial questions that drove our research were to find out how topics are

changing over time, who are the most active participants and what are certain

participants talking about. As we mentioned earlier, with thousands of people

engaging in political conversation on Twitter it becomes impossible to follow the

development of what is discussed and by whom. Our work addresses this challenge

and attempts to visually represent the voices of thousands of people. By investigating

topics of interest and visualizing the identity and presence of people participating, as

well as, their temporal activity and structure, the researchers attempted to find ways of

listening to all the voices that participated in Twitter conversations and invite the

users to take some their time to hear them and gain an understanding of that discourse.

Our approach in not based on a content analysis of the tweets but intends to

serve more as a political barometer visualizing topics, their context and the number of

users engaged in discussions about them. The topic’s importance is measured by

frequency of mentions and it is showed by the size or the bubble. Questions we

possibly want to answer are: Is there diversity in the topics? Are there many different

issues that concern people or a few are dominating the discourse? Are discussions

polarized or consensus prevails? Are twitterers focusing on local or national issues?

Are political speeches and TV debates defining the discourse on Twitter? How much

impact did TV have? Are the number of mentions to political parties and politicians in

accordance to the exit polls?



Screen shot of the Politwittic interface (work in progress)

Around each bubble, smaller bubbles are showing the number of contributing

authors. In addition, by clicking one specific author, we give access to the tweets that

each author tweeted hoping to make clear and provide and answers about: Are many

people discussing or only few contribute? Is there a plurality of voices or the accounts

of politicians and parties contribute the most. How are users connected to each other,

how are they affiliated? Do politicians use Twitter to interact and communicate with

voters?

For visualizing the connections between the different authors, the researchers

did not study the followers – followees structure. Instead, they focused on the real

moments of interaction, when users are not just connected but actually are readingeach other’s tweets, which are best indicated by the @user and retweet practices. In

particular, the researchers focused on the retweets as they are indicators of what

twitterers value in specific messages and in Twitter as a conversational environment.

In addition, through the retweet practices we also aimed in leveraging the part of what

Huberman characterized as the “hidden social network that matters the most”.



Concluding remarks

Twitter, according to Markopoulos et al. (in Hermida, 2010), represents the

next step in the evolution of communication technologies that have increased the

frequency and amount of information transfer, offering tremendous potential for

innovation and for perceiving the world around us. That is why the researchers value

attempts that seek to harvest Twitter’s content to reveal hidden layers of information

consisting of updates and reports about events on the ground, as well as, exploiting

potentials that stem from such an innovative medium for both personal reflection but

also social awareness.

In order to answer the question of what people are talking about in relation to

the provincial elections, the researchers did not approach the online discourse on

Twitter as separated from the offline. Twitter was approached as an additional

dimension to offline discussions and debates. An online platform on which various

discussions and topics are being held providing an online streaming river of thoughts

out events. However, what differentiates Twitter is the bottom-up structure of the

discourse that reinforces the view of what has been called as the demise of the

gatekeepers role in the Web 2.0 era and the rise of a collaborative and participatory

discourse and culture (Brunx, 2008). Could this egalitarian nature of the internet-

based discussion facilitate democratic, deliberative discussions amongst citizens?

The project aimed at listening to whom (plurality of voices) and what

(diversity of topics) was said about the elections in a two week period. The research

process that preceded the creation of the Politwittic project highlighted the

possibilities and limitations of information visualization attempts to depict the flow of

information and to derive meaning out of this mediated communication. Our work

sought to follow and explore online conversations about the provincial elections and

to represent the conversation topics in the context of their temporal development

together with participants’ activity.

However, as the research prototype is not yet fully functioning we cannot

assess to what extend this was successfully achieved and how informative our attempt

will be. We hope that several of the questions that drove our research will be



answered and in accordance to our findings to further develop our idea to be most

representative possible of the online Twitter discourse. Above all, we would like to

explore and possibly answer the question whether Twitter, as an innovative service

that attracts more and more users annually, may serve as a vehicle for political

deliberation that leverages the plurality of voices and the variety of topics of interest.

Total count of 5700 words



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