Examining the role of "Place" in Twitter Networks through the Lens of Contentious Politics

Abstract

From Tehran Square to Gezi Park, Twitter is an emergent tactic of protestors in the public square. Our work utilizes the theoretical framework of contentious politics and its human geographic extension as a framework for examining the role of "place" in Twitter-based networks of resistance. We examine Twitter traffic about local instantiations of Occupy Wall Street across eight cities. The study addresses mutual communications between Twitter participants in hashtags related to each of these local instantiations. This work explores the role of place as a constitutive component of these networks. To do so, we employ descriptive statistical and chi-square tests to examine the significance of user-defined metadata regarding place to the exchanges between users within a network. We conclude that place matters and point to future directions in computational and traditional qualitative analysis, spatial-temporal studies of social media, and the effects of locational propinquity for network development. © 2014 IEEE.