Month: June 2013

Cosmopolitan Public Spaces

Mentions of the Gezi Park protests on Twitter
Mentions of the Gezi Park protests on Twitter

In my PhD and post-doc research projects at the university, I did a lot of research on the new cosmopolitanism together with Ulrich Beck. Our main goal was to test the hypothesis of an “empirical cosmopolitanization”. Maybe the term is confusing and too abstract, but what we were looking for were quite simple examples for ties between humans that undermine national borders. We were trying to unveil the structures and processes of a real-existing cosmopolitanism.

I looked at a lot of statistics on transnational corporations and the evolution of transnational economic integration. But one of the most exciting dimensions of the theory of cosmopolitanism is the rise of a cosmopolitan public sphere. This is not the same as a global public that can be found in features such as world music, Hollywood blockbusters or global sports events. A cosmopolitan public sphere refers to solidarity with other human beings.

When I discovered the discussions on Twitter about the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, this kind of cosmopolitan solidarity seems to assume a definite form: The lines that connect people all over Europe with the Turkish protesters are not the usual international relations, but they are ties that e.g. connect Turkish emigrants, political activists, “Wutbürger” or generally political aware citizens with the events in Istanbul. Because only about 1% of all tweets carry information about the geo-position of the user, you should imagine about 100 times more lines to see the true dimension of this phenomenon.

Mapping a Revolution

Twitter has become an important communications tool for political protests. While mass media are often censored during large-scale political protests, Social Media channels remain relatively open and can be used to tell the world what is happening and to mobilize support all over the world. From an analytic perspective tweets with geo information are especially interesting.

Here’s some maps I did on the basis of ~ 6,000 geotagged tweets from ~ 12 hours on 1 and 2 Jun 2013 referring to the “Gezi Park Protests” in Istanbul (i.e. mentioning the hashtags “occupygezi”, “direngeziparki”, “turkishspring”* etc.). The tweets were collected via the Twitter streaming API and saved to a CouchDB installation. The maps were produced by R (unfortunately the shapes from the map package are a bit outdated).

*”Turkish Spring” or “Turkish Summer” are misleading terms as the situation in Turkey cannot be compared to the events during the “Arab Spring”. Nonetheless I have included them in my analysis because they were used in the discussion (e.g. by mass media twitter channels) Thanks @Taksim for the hint.

International Attention for Gezi Park protests 1-2 Jun
International Attention for Gezi Park protests 1-2 Jun

On the next day, there even was one tweet mentioning the protests crossing the dateline:

International Attention for Gezi Park protests 1-3 Jun
International Attention for Gezi Park protests 1-3 Jun

First, I took a look at the international attention (or even cosmopolitan solidarity) of the events in Turkey. The following maps are showing geotagged tweets from all over the world and from Europe that are referring to the events. About 1% of all tweets containing the hashtags carry exact geographical coordinates. The fact, that there are so few tweets from Germany – a country with a significant population of Turkish immigrants – should not be overrated. It’s night-time in Germany and I would expect a lot more tweets tomorrow.

European Attention for Gezi Park protests 1-2 Jun
European Attention for Gezi Park protests 1-2 Jun

14,000 geo-tagged tweets later the map looks like this:

European Attention for Gezi Park protests 1-3 Jun
European Attention for Gezi Park protests 1-3 Jun

The next map is zooming in closer to the events: These are the locations in Turkey where tweets were sent with one of the hashtags mentioned above. The larger cities Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir are active, but tweets are coming from all over the country:

Turkish Tweets about the Gezi Park protests 1-2 Jun
Turkish Tweets about the Gezi Park protests 1-2 Jun

On June 3rd, the activity has spread across the country:

Turkish Tweets about the Gezi Park protests 1-3 Jun
Turkish Tweets about the Gezi Park protests 1-3 Jun

And finally, here’s a look at the tweet locations in Istanbul. The map is centered on Gezi Park – and the activity on Twitter as well:

Istanbul Tweets about Gezi Park protests 1-2 Jun
Istanbul Tweets about Gezi Park protests 1-2 Jun

Here’s the same map a day later (I decreased the size of the dots a bit while the map is getting clearer):

Istanbul Tweets about Gezi Park protests 1-3 Jun
Istanbul Tweets about Gezi Park protests 1-3 Jun

The R code to create the maps can be found on my GitHub.