Tracking Discourse on Social Media

Archives Unleashed: Web Archive HackathonToronto, Ontario

Team Critical Load Average

Two events:

● Charlie Hebdo shooting (Jan 7, 2015)● Bataclan attack (Nov 13, 2015)

Two social media sites:

● Reddit● Twitter

TRACKING DISCOURSE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Four approaches:

● Attention span● Information flow● Topic modeling● Network analysis

REDDIT COMMENT:

TWEET:

REDDIT DATA

~50M comments a month on Reddit

13M comments the week following Hebdo shooting

25M comments the week following Bataclan attack

48,840 comments about the Hebdo shooting

110,520 comments about the Bataclan attack

6,964,831 bataclan tweets (english, nov. 13 - nov. 19)

4,280,030 hebdo tweets (english, jan. 7 - jan 13)

All our data

Use ALL available resources

60GB of JSON -> 1GB of txt

Attention on social media

Longitudinal Analysis (spread of information/misinformation)

(http://www.cs.odu.edu/~anwala/files/temp/archivesUnleashedHackathon/Bataclan_Twitter.html)

Longitudinal Analysis (evolution of conversation)

day 1 day 2 day 3 day 4 day 5 day 6 day 7

(http://www.cs.odu.edu/~anwala/files/temp/archivesUnleashedHackathon/Bataclan_Twitter.html)

Topic Modeling

Topic Modeling

NETWORK ANALYSIS: Word co-occurrence pattern for Charlie Hebdo

NETWORK ANALYSIS: Word co-occurrence pattern for Bataclan

FURTHER RESEARCH

● Longer time spans● Other types of events● Categorization (hashtags or subreddits)

This project brought to you by Team Critical Load Average:

Alexander Nwala, Old Dominion UniversityAllison Hegel, UCLAFederico Nanni, University of BolognaJonathan Armoza, NYUKelsey Utne, Cornell UniversityNick Ruest, York UniversityYu Xu, USC