Semester's Final Remarks

As the end of the semester approaches, I would like to summarize what I've learnt over the past semester. The main focus of my research at the Tetherless World Constellation was about an initiative that I started to explore with the intention explore how/why/what/where presenting information about oneself in a social context. My ideas are put together in this ppt.

The process of the Who am I (wAi) project, as I called it, began from an idea, which developed into researching the intricacies of building an application of this magnitude, to attending my first hackathon (sponsored by Facebook). This was the perfect opportunity to explore in depth Facebook's platform and its Graph API, and how the objects could be accessed for wAi. In addition, I wrote several queries using FQL , a SQL-style interface to query the data exposed by the Graph API. Unfortunately, that night due to some technical problems on Facebook's platform I could not check whether they worked in-situ. In brief, I became more knowledgeable about the table names, and object names, and how they're normally implemented in most systems.

In any case, this served me to simplify the scope of the project, at least in terms of my self-understanding. And helped me to define more exactly, and clear what and where I could go with wAi. So, I created a set of flowcharts that helped me visualize these ideas. Furthermore, this lead me to begin creating a Database model/diagram. Looking at the big picture within TWC Lab, all my intention was to represent this project in the best manner, so that in the long run when I understood how semantic technologies are applied, I could easily convert it....

Unfortunately, this great idea started to become a bit ambitious to be accomplished without

devoting much more time than the one I had in my hands. Also, given the remaining time frame, the scenario began to look even more daunting, since I really was the only one on board for my new project...

But in any case, thanks to Patrick, Tim, and John I could redirect my lab research at TWC into a somewhat similar field: online activism. Had I have more time, I now know what I would truly like to research on. And I think this is the most important lesson I get from TWC, where my interests lie if I ever want to research on a more full-time basis. Therefore, next time someone in the lab asks me whether I'm more of a synthetic person, or analytical; I'm clearly into the analytical aspect.

As a final note, I would like to also mention the discovery of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center at RPI, which I discovered during the Social Media Forum. Their research closely relates to social media analysis.

Online Activism - Middle East Protests

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.)

In the last decade it has been become a topic of discussion what online activism is, its impact, how we can analyze it, in what context it occurs...etc.

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.