Twitterology – A New Science? by NYTimes on Arabic Twitter traffic

Posted by: Languages Translation Voice Over on: October 31, 2011

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 After the death of Colonel Qaddafi, the linguist David Beaver and his assistants quickly summoned thousands of Arabic-language tweets before and after the event. They zeroed in on messages known to be from Libya by using Twitter’s system of geocoding. (Posts from cellphones, for instance, very often encode the user’s geographic coordinates.) The tweets were then automatically translated from Arabic to English and fed into a text-analysis computer program.

 

The researchers were able to create a dynamic portrait of Libya’s Twitter traffic. The overall traffic skyrocketed in the hours after Colonel Qaddafi’s death was announced, as did terms related to positive sentiment like “good” and “wonderful.” Religious sentiment was also on display, with a significant increase in the frequency of words like “Allah,” “sacrifice” and “gospel.” Twitterology – A New Science? – NYTimes.com.