1. 30,000,000 Occupation Tweets A hashtag co-occurrence network analysis of information flows Jeff Hemsley, Katherine Thornton, Josef Eckert, Shawn Walker, Robert M. Mason & Karine Nahon

2. NSF Award #1243170 INSPIRE: Tools, Models, and Innovation Platforms for Research on Social Media

3. #Overview Occupy & Question Literature & Data Model & Findings Next Steps?

4. #Occupy 9/17 to 10/15 21K+ Occupiers 2300+ cities Meetup.com

5. #Occupy 30,000,000 by end of 2011 Tweets: 300K to 1M a day

6. #Question Are there hashtag co-occurrence patterns indicative of organizing, informing and community building in the Occupy Twitter stream from October 19 th to November 5 th ?

7. Community Informing Organizing #Literature Tagging as finding and filtering mechanism – Huang, J., Thornton, K.M., and Efthimiadis, E.N. Conversational tagging in twitter. Proceedings of the 21st ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, ACM (2010), 173–178. Mechanism of organizing information – Chang, H.C. A new perspective on Twitter hashtag use: Diffusion of innovation theory. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 47, 1 (2010), 1–4. Information sharing – Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T., and Tseng, B. Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. Proceedings of the 9 th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 workshop on Web mining and social network analysis, ACM (2007), 56–65 Particularly about events – Letierce, J., Passant, A., Breslin, J., and Decker, S. Understanding how Twitter is used to spread scientific messages. (2010). Injecting messages into an information topic stream – Huang, J., Thornton, K.M., and Efthimiadis, E.N. Conversational tagging in twitter. Proceedings of the 21st ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, ACM (2010), 173–178. – Letierce, J., Passant, A., Breslin, J., and Decker, S. Understanding how Twitter is used to spread scientific messages. (2010). Community building mechanism – Laniado, D. and Mika, P. Making sense of twitter. The Semantic Web–ISWC 2010, (2010), 470–485. Connect with like-minded individuals – Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T., and Tseng, B. Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 workshop on Web mining and social network analysis, ACM (2007), 56–65. Discussion participation & network enhancing – Letierce, J., Passant, A., Breslin, J., and Decker, S. Understanding how Twitter is used to spread scientific messages. (2010).

8. #Literature 140-character limit => expect limited or no meta-data – Huang, J., Thornton, K.M., and Efthimiadis, E.N. Conversational tagging in twitter. Proceedings of the 21st ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, ACM (2010), 173–178. Occupy tweets with multiple hashtags? “Tweak the Tweet”: hashtags as metadata – Starbird, K., and J. Stamberger. 2010. “Tweak the Tweet: Leveraging Microblogging Proliferation with a Prescriptive Syntax to Support Citizen Reporting.” Target interest sub-sets with multiple tags

9. #Occupy #Tweets account1: support from #occupySydney #solidarity @OccupyChicago: The twentysix women in this policewagon say hello! #occupychicago #occupyarrests account2: RT@OccupyDenver Snow expected for #OccupyDenver tonight, 4-8 inches. Donations of warm clothing, etc would rock! #needsoftheoccupiers #ows account3: #GeneralStrike to give everyone a chance to #MoveYourMoney on #Nov5 account4: What happened to #OccupyOakland and the MSM response to it is further proof we need to #OccupyTheMedia with our own Internet media outlet.

10. #Expectations Hashtags as meta information for organizing information – Informing Location & Events Location & Utility – Community Location & Location Location & Slogan – Meta meta Meta & Location Meta & Slogan

11. #Expectations metalocationutilitysloganevent meta +o+o location +++++ utility o+-o+ slogan ++o- event o++

12. #Data SoMeLab data set: 30,000,000 Occupy Tweets Tweets with 2 or more tags Oct 20 – Nov 5, 2011 X 1 …X n : tag by tag dummyY: Co-occurrence Matrix

13. #Analysis Network Linear Regression Quadratic Assignment Procedure – Proportion random trials – Test for association – T-test X 1 …X n : tag by tag dummyY: Co-occurrence Matrix

14. #Findings metalocationutilitysloganevent meta + o ++ location +++++ utility o ++-o+ slogan ++o- event o +++

15. Meta: OWS is a hub and tied to everything – Volume of OWS: signaling community – Not so distributed? – OWS Power Law: other news-like social attention? Fire-bomb / noise / message injection #Findings #Issues

16. #Future #Directions 3D Matrix -> meta & location & utility Location: control for distance Block Model #GetAJob

17. SoMe Lab SocialMedia Lab @ UW http://somelab.net jhemsley@uw.edu Thank you