Graph drawing by force-directed placement
Software—Practice & Experience
The political blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. election: divided they blog
Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Link discovery
Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis
Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval
Analyzing (social media) networks with NodeXL
Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Communities and technologies
Computing political preference among twitter followers
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Democrats, republicans and starbucks afficionados: user classification in twitter
Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
(How) will the revolution be retweeted?: information diffusion and the 2011 Egyptian uprising
Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
The Egyptian blogosphere: a counter-narrative of the revolution
Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
The impact of the Internet on political attitudes in Kuwait and Egypt
Telematics and Informatics
Social media evolution of the Egyptian revolution
Communications of the ACM
Mining web query logs to analyze political issues
Proceedings of the 3rd Annual ACM Web Science Conference
Language processing for arabic microblog retrieval
Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
Bridges Between Cultural and Digital Worlds in Revolutionary Egypt
The Information Society
ECIR'13 Proceedings of the 35th European conference on Advances in Information Retrieval
#Egypt: visualizing Islamist vs. secular tension on Twitter
Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
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We use public data from Twitter, both in English and Arabic, to study the phenomenon of secular vs. Islamist polarization in Twitter. Starting with a set of prominent seed Twitter users from both camps, we follow retweeting edges to obtain an extended network of users with inferred political orientation. We present an in-depth description of the members of the two camps, both in terms of behavior on Twitter and in terms of offline characteristics such as gender. Through the identification of partisan users, we compute a valence on the secular vs. Islamist axis for hashtags and use this information both to analyze topical interests and to quantify how polarized society as a whole is at a given point in time. For the last 12 months, large values on this "polarization barometer" coincided with periods of violence. Tweets are furthermore annotated using hand-crafted dictionaries to quantify the usage of (i) religious terms, (ii) derogatory terms referring to other religions, and (ii) references to charitable acts. The combination of all the information allows us to test and quantify a number of stereo-typical hypotheses such as (i) that religiosity and political Islamism are correlated, (ii) that political Islamism and negative views on other religions are linked, (iii) that religiosity goes hand in hand with charitable giving, and (iv) that the followers of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood are more tightly connected and expressing themselves "in unison" than the secular opposition. Whereas a lot of existing literature on the Arab Spring and the Egyptian Revolution is largely of qualitative and descriptive nature, our contribution lies in providing a quantitative and data-driven analysis of online communication in this dynamic and politically charged part of the world.