Funded by College of Liberal Arts & Sciences’s (CLAS) Digital Humanities Seed Grant, the TweetChina project explores through a “big data” approach how “China” is discussed and represented on Twitter. Selecting China-related tweets from 30 billion of tweets archived by UNC Charlotte’s own Charlotte Visualization Center, this project develops a website to visually present large amounts of data in map, picture, text and event modes.

1. TweetChina!
Min Jiang (Ph.D. Communication Studies)
August 6, 2013 | UNCC

2. Agenda
• Impetus
• Media Forms: Text, Picture, Map, Event
• Define “China” on Twitter
• Prototype
• Ethical Concerns
• Interdisciplinary Collaborations

3. Impetus – Personal Experience

4. Impetus – Questions
• Who are talking about “China” on Twitter?
• Where are they located geographically?
• Who are opinion leaders in this space?
• What are the issues of the day?
• What are the most retweeted tweets & photos?
• …

5. Media Forms: Text

6. Media Forms: Picture

7. Media Forms: Map

8. Define “China” on Twitter
• Geography: geo-location
• Language: in Chinese (simplified or traditional)
• Keywords: profiles or tweets mention “China” or “Chinese”
• Issue/event: China-centered issue/event “Senkaku Island”
• Opinion leaders: followers, retweets, positive feedback
• Interaction: follow, retweet, comments

9. Define “China” on Twitter
• Chinese Twitterverse
• Geography, Language
• Chinese Twitter Crowds
• Keywords, Events/Issues
• Chinese Twitter Communities
• Opinion leaders, Interactions

10. Prototype

11. Prototype: Issues
• Source
• Can users choose different sub-datasets (e.g. language)?
• View
• Can users control how they view the data (e.g. picture only)?
• Search
• Can users search the TweetChina database?
• Export
• Can data (such as tweets, pictures) be exported?

12. Ethical Concerns

13. Interdisciplinary Collaboration
• Communication – Social Science
• Computer Visualization – Computer Science
• Design – Arts + Architecture
• Library – Information Science
• Law – Copyright, Trademark