[Air-L] Cyberactivism, twitter and elections in Venezuela. Research

[Daniela Artigas Avila]

This is the abstract of the latest project we have been doing, is about
cyberactivism, venezuelan elections and Twitter. If some of you are
interested or working with similar categories, please, let us know. We have
some methodological issues to solve.  More about the investigation program
here (in spanish) www.apropiacion.blogspot.com

*Abstract*

This research aims to describe the routines developed by the users of
twitter during the Venezuelan elections. It relies on the contributions of
Boyd (2005), Masten and Plowman (2003) and FAO (2011) related to digital
ethnography and passive observation and study methods and techniques
appropriate for the work that seeks to shape and characterize participants a
specific community, we also considered the research of Gonzalez (2005) and
Rheingold (2002) about cyberactivism, and smart mobs. Data collection was
performed with the tool The Archivist, and was the processed with the
statistical software named  CAVanaTuit. Among the first results we noted
that the Venezuelans have developed a series of practices, games and
behaviors that run regularly during the electoral day , it was observed that
people become digital reporters during the establishment of voting centers,
voting and the vote count. Among the most used tags, besides #26S, we found
and organize by frequency of appearance: #Venezuela, #Cuba, #ElNacional,
#cosasquepasaranantesdelboletín #fuerafocas. During the morning of 27S, the
twitter’s Venezuelans positioned 8 of 10 trending topics in the global
section on Twitter.

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*Key words*: Twitter, Venezuelan elections, ciberactivism, digital
ethnography, #26S


Daniela ARtigas Avila
Assistant professor at Unica <http://www.unica.edu.ve> / content web
coordinator at LUZ Web <http://www.luz.edu.ve>
@danielaart <http://twitter.com/#/danielaart>