What do 88,831 tweets about protest and revolution in Iran look like? Following in the success of Egypt’s #jan25 tag, protesters have piled onto the #25bahman tag to discuss Iran’s own prospects for “revolution” (25 Bahman 1389 is the Hijri date for February 14, 2011). Curious to analyze and compare these movements, I’ve started collecting some basic historical tweet data.
I’ll be digging into this more later, but for now, feel free to grab the dataset and enjoy the time series below.
Edit: I’ve updated the dataset. It now includes 97,215 tweets from Feb 10 to Feb 16.
P.S. go check out my buddy Drew Conway’s plot of the Top 15 Daily Tweeters of #25bahman for the Past Five Days.
That’s dramatic, yes – but couldn’t the same arc be represented if the data were “mentions of Egypt on network TV news” or “stories on Mubarak in print newspapers” … A more interesting pattern would be if there were a dramatic spike much earlier, and from Egypt locations, which would validate the incessant claim that Twitter (or other western social media) played a salient role in “sparking” or facilitating the “revolution.” I find that as misleading as the use of “revolution” itself, which of course this military coup wasn’t.
Hello there.
I’m glad you’re doing this – I was wondering about the twittersphere ever since I started reading about what was going on in Egypt.
Question – May I invite you to add your R tag (or category?) feed to R-bloggers?
http://www.r-bloggers.com/add-your-blog/
(If so – I suggest you do it before you post these articles, I assure you they will gain a lot of traffic from the site :) )
p.s: consider adding the “subscribe to comments” wordpress plugin.
Best,
Tal
Hi Tal,
Thanks for reaching out. I’d be happy to contribute to the r-bloggers site with my [r] tag. Thanks for the hint on the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin too!
This impressive. How can I download this kind of data from Twitter? I think google has something similar regarding the search engine’s queries.
Regards,
Costas
Hi Costas,
I’ll probably put up a post about it in the next few days. The code is kind of ugly at the moment and not very useful for other purposes yet.
Hi Michael,
One more suggestion – add some “copyright” section to the blog – mentioning that the images you upload here are copyrighted under CC share a like – with permission to redistribute under the terms of giving credit/mentioning the source (and for non commercial use)
I would have love to use your image in one of my Hebrew blog, but wouldn’t dare without you writing this upfront.
Cheers :)
Tal
keep track of #1esfand
there will be another protest on Esfahnd 1st (Feb 20)
Amazing, #ILoveInternet #ILoveR
Keep going Michael
Best Regards!
Thanks for the wonderful post. Just a minor note that “Hijri date” is not correct. Its called Persian (or Jalali) date and calendar which is a solar calendar, and is completely different from Hijri Calendar (arabic) which is a lunar calendar.
Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.