After analyzing the data, I found that the majority of the tweets uploaded were posted in the US, with a few posts in Russian and French. Since social media is used in the highest density in cities, I’m expecting to see most tweets posted in cities like New York City and Los Angeles, with the locations 40N, 74W and 34N, 118W respectively. These two cities are known to have among the highest densities of people, and therefore are likely to be talking the most about gay rights. My hometown is close to Hartford, so I think my geographic location is around 40N, 70W. It’s highly unlikely I’ll find much, if any, tweets from my hometown area because it’s more of a suburban area, and people are not as passionate about progressive issues there.<\/p>\n
There are 748 tweets that include #makeamericagayagain in this time frame. Only 9 had geolocations added, making 1.20% of the tweets. Yau describes in Data Points<\/em> how it is possible to develop maps of where an individual travels based off of the geographic location from their phone. If the geographic location enabler was not always on, however, this map will not be accurate, as some points and trips do not get recorded. Of almost 750 tweets that could be from all over the world, the 9 tweets with a geolocation is too small of a group to be an accurate representation of all of the logged tweets. Most of my tweets are likely to be in the Northwestern quadrant, as they are probably all posted in the United States. Since the hashtag is #makeamericagayagain, it is primarily Americans who are concerned about this issue. People in other countries may be curious about it, but it is unlikely that they will be passionate enough about a different country’s gay rights to tweet about it. All of the geographically tagged tweets are in English except for one, which is in Spanish. This is expected, as English and Spanish are the most frequently used languages in the United States. This does not affect my thinking, as it is what I expected.<\/p>\n Based on Boyd’s and Crawford’s description of big data, I could consider my results to be big data. They indicate that big data is often a misleading term, as “big” could indicate “significant” rather than “large.” As explained in their article, “Big Data [is] a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of technology … analysis … [and] mythology.” They later say that big data “changes the definition of knowledge” and usually makes the most sense when used in context – if referencing big data out of context, it loses its meaning. My tweet results certainly can provide conclusive results that can be reinforced with further research. The results tell us that people talking about gay marriage in America on Twitter are primarily American, and though a small percentage of individuals use geotags, all of the results indicate that the tweets were posted in the United States. The results are not big, but they are significant.<\/p>\n Julia only had .01% of her hashtags geotagged – of about 21,000 hashtags, 16 were geotagged. Olivia has 2,000 total tweets, of which only one was geotagged. I was initially surprised that my hashtag had so few tweets in comparison to theirs, but after analysis it made sense – the current news focuses more on transgender rights rather than gay rights. #standwithPP and #LGBTrights would certainly be more relevant as of the past few months than #makeamericagayagain, because although gay rights is coming into question again with our new president, the country is more passionate about developing even more new rights rather than maintaining what we already have.<\/p>\n\n\n