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Tracking protests using geotagged Flickr photographs
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Alanyali, Merve, Preis, Tobias and Moat, Helen Susannah (2016) Tracking protests using geotagged Flickr photographs. PLoS One, 11 (3). pp. 1-8. e0150466. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0150466
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0150466
Abstract
Recent years have witnessed waves of protests sweeping across countries and continents, in some cases resulting in political and governmental change. Much media attention has been focused on the increasing usage of social media to coordinate and provide instantly available reports on these protests. Here, we investigate whether it is possible to identify protest outbreaks through quantitative analysis of activity on the photo sharing site Flickr. We analyse 25 million photos uploaded to Flickr in 2013 across 244 countries and regions, and determine for each week in each country and region what proportion of the photographs are tagged with the word "protest" in 34 different languages. We find that higher proportions of "protest"-tagged photographs in a given country and region in a given week correspond to greater numbers of reports of protests in that country and region and week in the newspaper The Guardian. Our findings underline the potential value of photographs uploaded to the Internet as a source of global, cheap and rapidly available measurements of human behaviour in the real world.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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| Subjects: | Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Electronic computers. Computer science. Computer software | ||||||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Warwick Business School > Behavioural Science Faculty of Social Sciences > Warwick Business School |
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| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Online social networks, Geoinformatics, Protest movements | ||||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | PLoS One | ||||||||
| Publisher: | Public Library of Science | ||||||||
| ISSN: | 1932-6203 | ||||||||
| Official Date: | 1 March 2016 | ||||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 11 | ||||||||
| Number: | 3 | ||||||||
| Number of Pages: | 8 | ||||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 1-8 | ||||||||
| Article Number: | e0150466 | ||||||||
| DOI: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0150466 | ||||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Open Access | ||||||||
| Funder: | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), University of Warwick Vice Chancellor Scholarship | ||||||||
| Grant number: | EP/K039830/1 (EPSRC) |
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