Geolocations of #ISIS

From the results I found in my first post, I would expect to see people tweeting about #ISIS heavily in the American South, as well as from Washington, D.C. The section of the globe I am expecting to see the most tweets is around 35 degrees latitude, and -85 degrees longitude. This is the general area of the American South, and from what I’ve seen so far from the hashtag, there was a general trend from this area. I believe the latitude of my hometown is around 45 degrees, with a longitude of about -73 degrees. I do not believe I will see people tweeting about #ISIS there, because there are very few people in my hometown overall, so it would be a surprising coincidence.

Looking at the number of mapped tweets I have in comparison to the total tweets I have archived, only .0145% of my tweets were mapped.

I had a total of 68,955 tweets, with 10 of these containing geolocations, making only .0145% mappable. Because this is such a small percentage of the total tweets, it is difficult to say that any area is over or under-represented. There is a lack of representation as a whole, and each of the tweets come from dramatically different areas. Looking at the latitude and longitude coordinates, it seems that the tweets are very much spread out over the globe. In fact, the only countries that have more than one tweet coming from them are the United States, with two, and Japan, also with two tweets. I found this to be incredibly interesting, as the distribution of the geolocations were as even as I could have imagined. Aside from this even distribution, I was also surprised that none of these tweets were recorded as coming from the Middle East. 6 of the 10 tweets were in English, while two were in Japanese, one in Portuguese, and one in Spanish. These languages made sense with the distribution of the tweets, as many of them were from European countries, in addition to the two from the United States.

In terms of geolocations, I am certain that I do not have “big data” as described by Boyd & Crawford. The 10 tweets are by no means representative of any population, and do not tell me much. With nearly 70,000 total tweets, the #ISIS data set is beginning to have some of the qualifications of big data, however it still falls short. Boyd and Crawford define big data as ” a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon” that consists of the interplay of technology, analysis, and mythology (663). Boyd and Crawford briefly mention twitter in their article, referencing it as a potential source of big data. The example they use is “all twitter messages on a subject” (663), so if this is the qualification necessary for twitter data to be considered big data, my set would fall short, as it has only been recording tweets for a couple weeks now. While I have only recorded data on #ISIS for a short period of time, the data that I have gathered is beginning to reflect qualities of big data, in that is becoming a searchable and informative data set, that provides information toward global understandings and perspectives of #ISIS. The #ISIS hashtag had a similarly large number of tweets to the other members of my team. I believe this to be because each of our hashtags relate to international relations, and in the current state of the Trump presidency these topics are very pertinent.

This map displays the areas in which #ISIS has been tweeted about over the course of the past couple of weeks. I believe that this map is not very telling of the populations that are actually tweeting about the subject matter of ISIS, as there is so little data to pull from. The data is significantly spread  out among the  map, and there is little consistency other than a concentration in European countries. This is not what I would have expected in the slightest from browsing the tweets overall, as a majority of those tweets came from what seemed to be users based in the United States. This is not reflected in the data that I was able to use on the mapping program.

Population Density in New York City, from 1990-2010

The scale for this map is on a “cold to hot” color scheme, meaning that the areas which are blue have a relatively small population density, while the brighter red areas have a higher population density.

Total Population of an “Other Race” in Boston from 1990-2010

For this second set of maps, it looks at the diversity in the Boston area. This chart looks at “other race”, which does not include people of black, Hispanic, or Asian races. The lighter orange represents less of a presence of the “other race”.

Overall, it is difficult to represent #ISIS through census data, as nothing relating to the topic is tracked in the census. I chose to look at population density and total population of “other race”, in lieu of other options to look into. I chose to look at population density in New York, as areas which are densely populated tend to be the target of terrorist attacks. I chose the presence of “other race”, because this option included people of Middle Eastern descent by default, and I wanted to see if the immigration of people from the Middle East slowed as a result to anti-Muslim sentiments in America. The population density of New York showed what was to be expected: the city has become more densely populated over time in a gradual manner. One thing I noticed in looking into not only the total population of “other race” in Boston, but also all non-white races, was that Boston and its suburbs are on the whole a very white city as compared to other cities around the country. After looking beyond just the 1990,2000, and 2010 census and into the census of many other years, Boston has been significantly whiter than many other major cities for many years. I believe it to be due to a self-perpetuating culture of predominantly white areas in and around Boston.

In my J-Stor search, I found two articles of great interest. Each of them discussed ISIS in regard to the history and culture of the Middle East, which I found to be very interesting. In the first, the author discusses how ISIS has been destroying archaeological heritage in Iraq. The author delves into the subject of ISIS branding itself through this type of destruction, and the ways in which ISIS perpetuates itself in the media. The author suggests that ISIS destroys areas of historical meaning in order to remove the sense of belonging of people in the area. The second article hits on points that are extremely relevant in the context of our coursework, and this lab in particular. The author utilizes high resolution, satellite-based imagery to highlight the locations of archaeological destruction and looting in areas of high cultural significance. The author of this second article turns to the data in order to discuss the scope of the issue of looting and destruction in Syria, and analyzes the results in order to determine patterns across the area. This was extremely relevant to the type of research and analysis we have been discussing in this course, so I found this to be an incredibly pertinent article.

Ömür Harmanşah. “ISIS, Heritage, and the Spectacles of Destruction in the Global Media.” Near Eastern Archaeology 78, no. 3 (2015): 170-77. doi:10.5615/neareastarch.78.3.0170.

Jesse Casana. “Satellite Imagery-Based Analysis of Archaeological Looting in Syria.” Near Eastern Archaeology 78, no. 3 (2015): 142-52. doi:10.5615/neareastarch.78.3.0142.