Diren Gezi Parki – Tweet Analytics http://chrishokamp.com/diren/tweet_analysis/
Over the past week, I’ve been following the events in Turkey closely, as I’m sure many of you have. Although I couldn’t be there in person, I wanted to do something useful to contribute to these noble and courageous protests, and to show solidarity with my Turkish friends risking life and limb to peacefully defend their human rights.
Due to the alliance of the AKP government with most domestic media groups, the importance of these events has been downplayed within Turkey to a shocking extent. Those familiar with the Turkish political landscape harbor no illusions about the censorship of media, and general lack of free speech — but over the last week, all semblance of journalistic responsibility has been erased.
To fill the information gap, Turkish citizens from all walks of life have been obligated to become reporters, and they’re doing an excellent job! However, the huge amount of data streaming through Twitter and other social networks obviously contains both accidental and targeted misinformation, which must be filtered out in some way.
Thus began the #direntwitter analysis project. By aggregating tweets associated with the #direngeziparki movement, and utilizing algorithms from computational linguistics and information retrieval to extract the juicy stuff, I hope that the information contained in this deluge of tweets can become more structured, organized, and ultimately useful, both for post-hoc analysis, and for public discussion about the facts surrounding these events.
For a start, here is some information on the top hashtags from Sunday 2.6.13, sorted by information content, and containing the top terms for each hashtag. This dataset represents information from approximately 40,000 tweets, and there’s much more to come.
If you have ideas about ways to use Twitter data for (pro)social action, let’s work together! I’ll be very happy to share all code with you, and stuff should be up on github by this weekend.
Kurtuluş yok tek başına ya hep beraber ya hiçbirimiz…