Submitted by Tobias Eigen on 2 June, 2010 - 11:35

I made a claim recently that twitter usage in African countries is uneven, with for example #kenya being hyperactive and #chad being virtually invisible. I think this is almost certainly true, but would be interested to see if any data is available to support my claim. Then it would be interesting to follow up in various countries to see what other social media might be more actively in use and if not to see what the barriers are to uptake. 

Yes, I realize that Chad is the worst example to cite in any case because, as a quick twitter search reveals, it has many frivolous meanings completely unconnected to the country - e.g."my friend chad hung up on me", "take a look at my hanging chad" etc. I also know it's imperfect because people might be tweeting about #nairobi and not #kenya all the time. Of course, Twitter doesn't give a particularly full picture of social media in a country because even many social media savvy people prefer Facebook, other social networking sites or their own blog to stay connected. Nevertheless I am curious. 

So is there is a fairly painless, quick and dirty way to test my assumption of twitter presence by gathering data on country mentions? For example, is there an existing tool that takes advantage of Twitter's API to let you feed it a bunch of hashtags and a timeframe, which then spits out the number of mentions per hashtag into a table that can then be visualized on a map or charts? Has someone done this already? 

To start with, a simple visualization of twitter mentions of country names would be interesting enough - but then if we could find ways to disaggregate the data to show for example how many mentions by people inside and outside the country, NGOs vs media vs government, topics mentioned, etc that would also help us to understand the nature and relevance of the uptake of twitter in Africa. A research project for a team of grad students perhaps. 

Also, how many African presidents have an official twitter user account that s/he uses actively to engage with citizens? I know Kenya's president, Mwai Kibaki, has a spoof account @mwaikibaki - with 1076 followers! 

I will happily gather answers here and will share any findings. 

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Submitted by Tobias Eigen on 2 June, 2010 - 16:53.

I just got the below via email from @thakadu who has experience with these things. Looks to me like there is a good possibility we could put something together. Please contact me if you are a programmer interested in working on this or if you know someone. Thanks! 

One way I can think of is to use the Twitter streaming api. This is now free and open to anyone. We would have to use each country name as a search term and run 50 or so stream collectors, one for each country. That will be for the data gathering side. For plotting the data this is a relatively simple task using Google maps (or other) API.

As it happens I am now authoring the SilCC module of Swift River and inside the SilCC distro is an example of using the streaming API to collect tweets on any topic, in addition it automatically tags the tweets but you probably wont need this part since you are already streaming by a known country.

This is a project that a student should be able to easily accomplish in a few weeks of coding.

Best of luck and let me know how it goes.

Regards

and then in the next message after I asked him if he'd be up for mentoring a student on this: 

Yes, sure, you may try getting a GSoC student. I am already mentoring one for this summers program for a related project. I can ask him if he knows anyone. It may be too late to qualify for GSoC, I dont really know but you could do it without GSoC too.

Submitted by Tobias Eigen on 2 June, 2010 - 22:12.

@dacort suggested RowFeeder.com via twitter - not a cheap service but shows promise. Also offers ability to download data from Facebook on specific terms as well as Twitter. 

 

@kabissa Saw your tweets about gathering country mentions, you may want to try @rowfeeder.

Submitted by Tobias Eigen on 4 June, 2010 - 09:45.

@schnippy suggested @managingnews - an open source @drupal distro designed for just this sort of task produced by @Developmentseed in Washington DC: 

re: twitter maps, I would assume that the combined data stream coming from this would be more than you would want to handle with the map interface, or to try to integrate into the site. Have you seen development seed’s open source  drupal distro, “managing news”?

http://managingnews.com/download

This might be a good test case for this project, setup on a separate domain probably. 

Sounds like a great idea! Anybody interested in helping set this up? I could host it on the Kabissa server. Looks like with @managingnews we could track all kinds of country mentions from various sources on the web, not just twitter. 

 

Submitted by Juergen Eichholz on 4 June, 2010 - 14:21.

Both look like a good idea - even Neville's idea is good.

I came up with @afritwit on Twitter and the afritwit.com domain after a Skype conversation with Erik, Juliana, Neville, Bw Kobia and someone else I don't remember right now. My inspiration was the site swisstweets.ch which back then was a php mashup that displayed all tweets from Switzerland (their site has since then changed for various reasons).

So, what exactly do we want? Something like Christian's ICT4D stream on a particular (ICT4D) issue, or ALL Tweets from or about Africa mentioned on one page?

Submitted by Tobias Eigen on 7 June, 2010 - 13:35.

Thanks Juergen - let's try to talk voice later this week as I wrote separately in an email. We can then use this blog post to capture any ideas. 

It looks to me like you're approaching the other end of the stick - tracking twitter accounts belonging to Africans. What I want to do is track - and visualize - the number of mentions of African countries on a regular basis. Capturing and showing the actual tweets would be secondary, though potentially quite powerful as well. 

An email exchange with rowfeeder.com, which offers a service to track keywords on twitter and facebook and provides results to you as csv files, seems to indicate that this would involve a huge amount of data gathering on a regular basis, which they were unwilling to donate to us and which in effect might even be too much for the Kabissa server. 

I'd be interested in knowing who might be doing this sort of thing on an academic basis and plug into or benefit from their efforts. It would be surprising if this were not already being done. 

Cheers,

Tobias

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