We could have also called it The Study of Political Manipulation Techniques. This article reveals how the US presidents masterfully used the right rhetorics to address the general sentiment of their voters and set the forthcoming political agenda. Comparative analysis of their inauguration speeches using dynamic text network analysis clearly demonstrates how the importance of various concepts shifts with the new political challenges that the newly elected presidents face.
Networks are everywhere and yet it’s still a very abstract concept. Together with our colleagues from Transnomia Institute we put together a special workshop that offers a very tangible experience of networks to the participants. As a result, they get intuitive and embodied knowledge of various network structures and learn to extend their social skills beyond the common patterns and codes of behavior.
re:publica is “Germany’s largest and most prominent conference on the future of our society and all things digital”. This year’s theme is action and will focus on how digital technologies bring people together to affect social and political change.
This is a report on the experiment that Nodus Labs conducted on some of the more active Russian protest Facebook groups formed after the rigged Russian election in 2011. We made two network visualizations for three different protest groups over a period of one month in order to observe their dynamics. We found that the most influential members of these groups were not too politically engaged before the elections and were mainly journalists, students, event organizers, and media workers. We also found that the groups formed around ideological causes (such as “Putin must leave”) stagnated in their development in January 2012, while the groups formed around a call for active participatory actions (“Volunteers for the fair elections”) have grown in size and density considerably, building a very well connected and yet open network that was able to bring many new members together around their cause.
In this post we demonstrate how one can detect and analyze the most influential communities and hubs in any Facebook network using Gephi and netvizz applications. We also show how network analysis can be used to identify the strong and weak sides of the network, predicting its possible future development and showing the strategies that could lead to its more sustainable development. We use the real Facebook groups created to support the protest against rigged elections in Russia in December 2011.