Characterizing Venezuelan Elections through Twitter. Case: # 26s

Abstract

This paper is aimed to discover the characteristic routines established by Twitter users along September 26th 2010, an Asamblea Nacional election day in Venezuela. It is based on previous studies by Boyd (2005), Masten and Plowman (2003) and FAO (2011) on digital ethnography and passive observation as the appropriate methods and techniques for modeling and characterizing the behavior of a digital community. The data acquisition was achieved using The Archivist, while the software CAVAnaTuit was developed by the authors for the corresponding analysis. Among the results, it is clear that Venezuelans have developed a series of practices, behaviors and games that they execute systematically along the Election Day; the users behave as digital journalists for covering the vote’s instauration, execution and counting. The whole process being started at 9am and finished on September 27th, the analysis revealed that the maximum amounts of tweets were written at 6 pm, while the minimum was detected to occur at 4 pm. Even when the data acquisition was designed to include the hashtag #26S, among the other most frequent hashtags were: #Venezuela, #Cuba, #ElNacional, cosasquepasaranantesdelboletín y #fuerafocas. During the early morning of September 27th were positioned into the Trending Topics 8 hashtags related to Venezuela and the elections results.