Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolution By Gilad Lotan, Erhardt Graeff, Mike Ananny, Devin Gaffney, Ian Pearce, and danah boyd Web Ecology goes peer-review! In a new International Journal of Communication article, Web Ecologists Erhardt Graeff, Devin Gaffney, and Ian Pearce collaborated with friends of Web Ecology Gilad Lotan, Mike Ananny, and […]
Preview of an Upcoming WEP Report By Erhardt Graeffwith Seth Woodworth Data Summary 111,741 tweets about Afghanistan and its presidential election posted between August 11, 2009 and September 9, 2009 11,255 tweets on August 20, 2009, the day of the election 29,642 users talked about Afghanistan in our dataset Top 10% of tweeters contributed 65% […]
New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter By Alex Leavittwith Evan Burchard, David Fisher, & Sam Gilbert Using a new methodology based on the content and responses of 12 popular users, we determined measurements of relative influence on Twitter. We examined an ecosystem of 134,654 tweets, 15,866,629 followers, and 899,773 followees, and in response to […]
A Preview of WEP Report #4 When deciding whether someone is worth following or talking to on Twitter, most of us make a snap judgment based on a user’s follower count, but what does this really tell us? For our fourth publication, the Web Ecology Project decided to move beyond follower count to find a […]
Sentiment Analysis and Mourning Michael Jackson on Twitter By Elsa Kim and Sam Gilbert with Michael J. Edwards and Erhardt Graeff Michael Jackson’s death created an emotional outpouring of unprecedented magnitude on Twitter. In this report, we examine 1,860,427 tweets about Jackson’s death in order to test various methods of sentiment analysis and gain insights […]
Not surprisingly, the inevitable outcome of this state of affairs is that the body of research about the web is fatally fragmented. Economists are caught attempting to assert dated models against new motivational frameworks. Journalists attempt to prescribe weak methods to maintain traditional standards around the creation and transfer of information. Marketers and social media experts, still largely divorced from a universe of quantitative and technical research, fail to provide a useful approach. No coherent body of research has emerged focusing on studying the internet as the internet.
This has resulted in fundamental weaknesses in the approach to studying social phenomena online. Relevant approaches are being ignored and opportunities for applying cutting edge research from a number of siloed traditions are going unexplored.
Our field poses two simple questions to researchers:
The emerging field of Web Ecology is an attempt to unify contemporary research and practice under a common focus, set of principles, and general approach to promote new insights and more fruitful forms of exchange in this space. We believe that these lay the groundwork for a more vibrant, more dynamic, and more useful field of research and community of researchers.
The First Eighteen Days Key Findings From 7 June 2009 until the time of publication (26 June 2009), we have recorded 2,024,166 tweets about the election in Iran. Approximately 480,000 users have contributed to this conversation alone. 59.3% of users tweet just once, and these users contribute 14.1% of the total number. The top 10% […]
