Twitter Contagion

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"Egypt is the crystal ball in which the Arab world sees its future," writes Kovas Boguta, creator of this data visualization (above), which analyzes the Twitter communication that erupted during the recent youth uprising in Egypt .

Boguta, founder and CTO of Infoharmoni -- which analyzes real-time social structures on the Web -- says he arranged the map to place individual Twitter users close to the people with whom they communicate. The red and blue dots represent which language users were using to communicate (Arabic is denoted in red, while English is denoted in blue). The size of the dots represents the individual's influence on the group as a whole. Different factions are placed near the factions they influence, revealing how weak ties get stronger.

Boguta offered this explanation February 11th on his blog, Computational History:

“Many fascinating structures can be seen. Wael Ghonim, a pivotal figure in this self-organizing system who instigated the initial protests on January 25th, is prominently located near the bottom of the network, straddling two factions as well as two languages. The size of his node reflects his influence on the entire network.

The lump on the left is dominated by journalists, NGO and foreign policy types; it seems nearly grafted on, and goes through an intermediary buffer layer before making contact with the true Egyptian activists on the ground. However, this process of translation and aggregation is key; it is how those in Egypt are finally getting a voice in Western society, and an insurance policy against regime violence. Many of the prominent nodes in this network were at some point arrested, but their deep connectivity help ensure they were not ‘disappeared’.”

"Most of those in this network speak both English and Arabic, and their choice of language says a lot about both the movement and about Twitter. Some may choose to primarily communicate with friends, while others make an effort to be visible to the rest of the world on purpose. They want to reach out, and connect with, the rest of global society."

Boguta told TechCrunch at the launch of Infoharmoni in 2009:

People are social animals, and love to both move in packs and purposefully individuate. ... Existing social groups incubate new topics of interest on Twitter, and existing interests incubate new social groups. Both move in response to each other. Twitter bills itself as the pulse of the planet, but it's more like the pulse of creative networks.

Tweets Like Us

What do our Google queries and Tweets say about us? The short answer: We're a pretty divided lot in cyberspace -- but then, we kind of already knew that, right? [We're divided offline, too.]

What's new is that we can now tell what unites us, just from visualizing the knowledge we seek on Google and the hashtags we frequent on Twitter. A new data visualization tool called Web Seer, developed by two former IBM colleagues, provides some insights into what it is about the echo-chambers of today's identity politics that keeps us all arguing so much to begin with.

Skeptical? Let's have a look. Go to "Google Suggest" on your browser and click on "web search." Type in the word "why." Thanks to an "auto-suggest" feature that this and many other search engines now use, just typing in the word "why" produces a list of suggested, presumably popular completions. Today's list? "Why...did I get married?" is the most popular question, followed by, "Why is the sky blue?" and "Why do dogs eat grass?" ["Why don't you love me?" also ranks right up there with "Why did I leave Astoria?" -- a question that people who live in the New York City borough of Queens might especially appreciate.]

Amusing? Yes, and according to a new data visualization tool called Web Seer from Flowing Media, a new startup cofounded by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, searches like these also give the Web-curious "a little peek into our collective souls," says Viegas. "Exploring this Web Oracle can be quite revealing of society's fears, curiosities and prejudices."

Let's type in a new question, "Why doesn't he ... ?" When I did this, I got "call me" and "like me" and "ask me out." Sure enough, typing in the question, "Why doesn't she ... ?" surfaces similar completions. The differences, though, are the most telling in this case; Web Seer's visualization of the Google Suggest data spots the male-female divide instantly. Men tended to complete uniquely with "call me back?" and "just leave?" and "like me anymore?" while women appeared to be more interested in why he didn't "text back" and "want a relationship."

Viegas says deeper gender divisions become evident when it comes to family issues. The question "Is my daughter ... ?" is most likely to generate "pregnant" and "a virgin" and "gifted" and "austistic." Type in the question, "Is my son ... ?" and you'll likely get "a homosexual" and "on drugs." Says Wattenberg, "If you play around with this for a while, you start to see a portrait of people's anxieties and, I think, ultimately, a very clear gender division in society."

When Web Seer is applied to party politics, the divisions seem even more troubling. "Are Republicans ... richer than Democrats?" and "evil?" and are Democrats "socialists?" and "communists?" Viegas says that people in the analysis seem"confused, very much so, about party differences." But the areas of agreement, in this case, were just as revealing. According to Web Seer, people who typed questions into "Google Suggest" about either party asked if both Republicans and Democrats "are retarded" and "are morons" and "are destroying America" -- in other words, most who query "Google Suggest" about U.S. politics are similarly, deeply skeptical about the effectiveness and integrity of either party.

Okay, so now let's check out Twitter. Are we divided there, too? To find out, Viegas and Wattenberg analyzed Twitter trending topics over the 2010 Memorial Day weekend; after analyzing the photographs of those tweeting in some 10 Twitter trending conversations, ranging in topic from #wordsbeforedeath to #oilspill, the pair discovered that non-whites and whites were mostly equally involved in some conversations -- but not others. In this case, whites and non-whites were about equally involved in a conversation about #wordsbeforedeath -- but #cookout tweets were being written predominantly by non-whites and #oilspill tweets were being written, overwhelmingly, by whites.

The point here? "It's not to think, wow, there's racial segregation on the Web. We sort of knew that; the Web is a reflection of real life," said Viegas. "The point here is that this level of segregation is just one click away from the Twitter home page and it's happening in the trending topics. The fact that you can look at trending topics and be immersed in conversations that are so separate from one another is something to keep in mind."

Beyond simply insightful, these kinds of real-time "focus group" data visualizations are starting to be used by political groups, as well as by nonprofit causes seeking new supporters and social enterprises in search of some target markets or information about potential trouble spots beyond those which may seem obvious.

Got any further insights to share? Let us hear from you.

Here are Viegas and Wattenberg at the 2010 Personal Democracy Forum in June:

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration, top: istock.com)

Dead Zones

Alan Berger spends a lot of time poking around some of the most dangerously polluted places in the world, from the slums of Mumbai to the toxic slag pools of the American West. But where others might simply see cyanide deposits and smelly canals, Berger—a new-wave landscape architect and urbanist—sees a clearing.

Berger—the founder of P-REX, the Project for Reclamation Excellence at MIT—has a vast but profoundly singular goal: to change the world, literally, by altering the landscape.

Berger’s vision goes far beyond beautification. Where others might simply recommend that polluting farms and factories be shut down—or destroyed lands be returned to their natural, prettier state—Berger specializes in creating whole new ecosystems out of places that humans have left for dead, either from neglect or design.

Some places are so environmentally ravaged, he says, “you can never go back.” Thanks to new computer modeling technologies and newly available environmental data—from the spread of pine beetle devastation in the American West to the size of the hypoxic dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico—Berger and his team don't have to. Instead, they design new ecosystems that use nature to heal itself.

Berger approaches each new project like a Digital Age detective: Using low-angle aerial photography, maps, computer models combined with complex data sets and other graphic evidence, Berger visually reveals evidence of landscape waste—dead or under-utilized land areas—and how they interact with the environment and man-made patterns of behavior over time. GIS (Geographic Information Systems) computer technology can, he says, stack information in a new way “to see relationships that the normal visual or physical experience in the landscape wouldn’t be able to reveal.” Then Berger will, in some cases, work to redirect the flow of water, move hills around, build islands where there were none and plant new species to absorb pollution, create more natural artificial landscapes that can ultimately sustain themselves.

Case in point: Berger's Pontine Marshes project along the Mediterranean coast of Italy southwest of Rome is attempting to re-create a natural wetland in a valley through which some of Italy’s most seriously polluted waters now pass; he aims to infuse this area with a careful, complex mix of the right kinds of plants, dirt, stones, and drainage channels, to serve as a natural filter through which severely contaminated waters can flow on their way through coastal residential areas and back out to the sea. “This area is so ecologically out of balance,” Berger says, that “romantic notions of a vacation landscape playground just south of Rome will be tempered by the very real pollution problems expanding there.” Berger told a New York Times reporter last fall: “You can’t restore [this area]. You have to go forward, to set this place on a new path.”

Besides the marshes project, Berger is working with the French government to analyze landscape waste around Paris; he also is involved in a 2,400-acre reclamation project in the French Gulch area around the community of Breckenridge, Colorado, that is part of a larger initiative to clean up an abandoned lead-zinc-copper-sulfide and gold ore mine as part of a Superfund cleanup underwritten by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Key to all of his work is the discovery of how life has adapted to spoiled environments; the French Gulch project is an example. “When non-native trout species were introduced to the mountain streams there (as part of an earlier reclamation effort),” Berger says, “no one realized that they would quickly out-compete the native trout species" and push them onto the endangered species list: Berger discovered that the polluted mine drainage waters are actually protecting the native species from being destroyed by the fish newcomers. "Clean this up and the native species will not survive," says Berger.

Berger is first to admit that especially internationally, what he does is still not universally embraced but he is optimistic. “I think what we are witnessing today is a renewal of landscape’s intellectual and critical dimensions,” he says. “Humans will continue to consume and abuse [the environment], but if we can find ways to coordinate those activities with information technology and the dynamics of ecology, that will be a true civilization-scale advancement.”

—Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: Viridian for istock.com)

(NOTE: This is an edited version of a post that first appeared on PopTech.com)

Explorations

Digital visualization wunderkind Jonathan Harris has just launched his latest art and technology effort. Called the Sputnik Observatory for Contemporary Culture, it's a Web site and blog that grew out of a two-year collaboration with New York-based Sputnik, Inc., an organization that documents contemporary culture through intimate, previously unpublished video interviews with hundreds of leading thinkers in the arts, sciences, and technology.

A range of innovators, including Vint Cerf to experimental geographer Trevor Paglen, game designer Will Wright, science writer Philip Ball, and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, among others, share "some of the most provocative human ideas to have emerged in the last few decades," Harris says. [Harris, himself, is featured, explaining his 2005 "We Feel Fine" project, a real-time survey of human emotions on the Web.] Adds Harris:

"The central premise of the Sputnik project is that everything is connected to everything else, and that topics and ideas that may seem fringe and even heretical to the mainstream world are in fact being investigated by leading thinkers working in fields as diverse as quantum physics, mathematics, neuroscience, biology, economics, architecture, digital art, video games, computer science and music. Sputnik is dedicated to bringing these crucial ideas from the fringes of thought out into the limelight, so that the world can begin to understand them; the site itself aims to highlight the interconnections between seemingly disparate thinkers and ideas, using a simple navigational system with no dead-ends, where every thought leads to another thought, akin to swimming the stream of consciousness."

Harris says there are about 200 videos on the site, and will be thousands more added over time. [Sputnik is a Russian word that means "co-traveler." It was the name the Russians gave to the robotic spacecraft missions they created in the 1950s to launch, in 1957, the first human-made object into Earth's orbit.]

(Illustration from Sputnik Observatory site)