Iran: What Do 1.4 Million Tweets Look Like?

An interesting "interim" post from Ali Fisher at Wandren PD, who is pursing an ongoing protest to map the use of Twitter in the post-election crisis. He has added to his October post, "The Iranian Election: Following a Conversation", by taking on the daunting task of mapping data from those using the #IranElection tag:

The level of traffic limited the extent to which a user could keep up with the flow of information from #IranElection. at its peak the #tag was running at over 22,500 tweets an hour and nearly 100,000 tweets in a day. There is little anyone can get from reading 375 tweets a minute, forcing users to rely on filters such as the more specific tags, or choosing only to follow certain users; narrowing the field of view but having a chance to understand what is being produced.

His work is at an early stage, but here's a number to make the head spin: in the 10 weeks after the election, there were 1,466,708 tweets using #IranElection.

Equally important (from my point of view), there are still quite a few using that tag, even as we add #16Azar.