Introduction The film adaption of the popular book “Hunger Games” premiered in the US in March 2012, and later on in the UK. I had seen the trailer and press promotion for this movie, and was mildly intrigued as to what it was all about, being a little surprised when my Google Alerts email had a link to a NewYorker.com article about one of the young actresses on the show suffering abuse on Twitter. Upon [...]

I have spent the majority of May volunteering as a data visualisation consultant at Tactical Tech – a digital activist NGO based in Berlin. Part of my brief there is to create a series of guides for activists in the field, that give them good examples of how to protect themselves, and visualisations of how their data could potentially be compromised if they allow the ‘devil in the default’ to rule and don’t tweak their [...]

Introduction and Discussion On Friday 20th April 2012, Sheffield United striker Ched Evans was jailed for five years on Friday for raping a 19-year-old woman at a hotel near Rhyl, Wales. An extract from an article by The Guardian’s Amanda Bancroft summarises the controversy and general sentiment surrounding the events: On Friday afternoon, the Sheffield United footballer Ched Evans was sentenced to five years in jail for raping a 19-year-old woman. His co-accused, Port Vale footballer Clayton McDonald, [...]

Introduction On 27th March 2012, The Guardian published an article called “Twitter: Twitter racism: how the law is taking on the ‘Twacists’”, which discussed the growing rise of racist abuse towards young black male sports people and celebrities on Twitter. In this article, they described this emerging form of Twitter racism: “Twacism”, and the people that posted these abusive tweets: “Twacists”: A spate of racist comments directed at Premiership footballers and broadcast on Twitter has [...]

Introduction In one of a final sessions last term, we had a CAST London lab session based around the dynamic use of HTML5 as a visualisation tool. One of the key things learned in this session was how to use a combination of sound and images to visualise an investigation into our research question – in my case: “Who Abuses Who on Twitter, and How do they Respond?” Following the sadly growing trend of racist [...]

Introduction In a bit of a digression from studying people abusing each other on Twitter, after I witnessed the progression of a particular hasthtag that was instead about how people are encouraged/outraged enough to report real-world abuse via social media platforms – I decided to employ my skills to find out how and why this happens, and the fascinating life of a particular social network meme. I first came across the #ididnotreport twitter hashtag in [...]

Introduction A busy month on my MSc Digital Sociology course has seen me learn a whole host of new things, from mapping the prevalence of spam and abuse across small social networks using digitally qualitative tools, to learning how to create Corona and Android based smartphone apps to visualise elements of my research question. Below is a discussion of the methods used, problems tackled and a bit of a interactive and somewhat musical result. Methods and Discussion [...]

Introduction In week 14 of our CAST London Sandbox sessions, we learnt about visualising networks through mapping software such as Openstreetmap, TileMill and Mapbox – as a result I was inspired to use a combination of these APIs to see if I could really map a sample of abuse tweets over a day on Twitter. One of the key questions I have had in relation to my research question: “Who Abuses Who on Twitter, and [...]

Introduction After our recent CAST Lab session ‘Web hacks and visualisations’ with Tony Hirst, on the use of Google, Twitter and Yahoo Pipes APIs and Gephi to scrape and visualise social networks, I decided to use these methods to explore how many people were tweeting about John Terry in the newly ignited row about his prosecution, loss of England Captaincy and the resignation of England manager Fabio Capello in February 2012. I used a combination [...]

On February 14th, the BBC broadcast sn interesting intverview with footballer’s wife, Lizzie Cundy and CAST London director, Dr Chris Brauer on how celebrities should reply to tweets of an abusive nature.  I decided to do a quick Twitter scrape to gauge sentiment analysis around her comments in the interview, where I used a variety of tools, including Hawksey’s TAGSExplorer, SocialMention, and Twendz to scrape tweets mentioning her in the 24 hours during and after [...]