Given the circumstances of the scope of wAi project, I decided to move towards another field, not too far away from it, but perhaps more on the analytical side of already published works in the field of online activism. Thanks to Tim Lebo and Patrick West at the TWC Lab, I ended up with a deeply interesting piece of work written by past researcher at the lab, Devin Gaffney (link to original pdf.)
Some of the conclusions that I understand from the analysis made by Devin, which focused on the Iran election, challenged the manual "curation method" for leaning only towards qualitative analysis. In his paper, he uses quantitative analysis instead, which in the case of online activism is fairly new. His method shows very interesting data findings that directly address issues such as whether a "Twitter Revolution" is occurring in the Middle East since 2009 aiding physical revolutions to actually develop. Currently, if you search for "curation method" one sees that it's predominant in the biomedical/bioinformatics arena for most of it.
If you think of it, the fact remains that since the Moldova civil unrest (2009) a series of other protests followed: the Iranian elections (2009-2010), Tunisian revolution (2010-2011), Egyptian revolution (2011). Among all the factors which may explain why these revolts took place and spread across the Middle East, Twitter should be taken into account as, perhaps, the primary medium to coordinate the protests.
Not only these four revolts represent the impact, but also an incredible wave of Middle East demonstrations (see this interactive map for latest news). In addition, similar coverage is given by a wide variety of world newspapers or news channels such as the New York Times, the Guardian, BBC news, NPR, among some of them.
This is real! And therefore, even more interesting is whether thanks to Twitter, these revolts were seen as a victory, inciting so surrounding countries under repressed societies to rise up against their dictators to form a revolution.
Many questions may be answered by showing the evidence of Devin's quantitative analysis methodology, especially in the current context of the Arab World Uprisings.
On the other hand, ethics is another issue to spend time thinking about, and should be considered analyzing if further study wants to be done.
