Mese: luglio 2010

UK 2010 General Elections

We’re working on more generalised model of information propagation in Microblogging context, therefore we started playing with some Twitter data. As starting point we downloaded some data about #ge2010 (UK 2010 General election). When we noticed that some of the tweets contained the geolocalization we decided to map them using Google Visualization API. Here you can see the result.
Geo-referenced tweets about UK 2010 General Elections.
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July RoundUp

July has been a month fully packed of SIGSNA activities. At the beginning we’ve been in Oxford for the Research Methods festival [reported here] and after that we had just a few days at home and we had to fly to Gothenburg for the International Sociological Association Conference (ISA 2010). Due to the high interdisciplinary approach of the SIGSNA project we have to move through many different conferences so it might be strange to follow the line of all our presentations, but that’s the best part of it: to be able to share our research and our ideas with so many colleagues from a large variety of disciplines. During the ISA conference we presented at the RC51- Sociocybernetics session. Sociocybernetic is an interesting sociological approach rooted in the System theory and in Complexity theory; nowadays it shows a good theoretical background for a Sociological Approach to the internet studies. What’s really cool is that I won the “Walter Buckley Memorial Award for Excellence in Presenting Sociocybernetics”!!
Here you can check the slides I used during my presentation:

As soon I made my way back to Bologna I attended the International Visual Sociology Association Conference here in Bologna. Visual Sociology is a rather recent and fascinating field of research and I really wanted to show some visual hints we had from our research. So I presented a brief discussion analysing the top100 most commented pictures posted in the Italian Friendfeed durng our sampling time. Well I’m happy to say that we had a great panel there together with some friends also presenting on UGC/SNS pictures (Agnese, Marina, Alessandra, Stefania, and Fatima – and Many thanks to Giovanni and Laura, chairs of the session).
Here you can see the slides I presented during my talk:

So what’s next? July was really full of stuff and we recently received the news that the SIGSNA research has been authorised to use some of the computing resources of the CINECA supercomputer centre. I can clearly see a huge amount of work just ahead.