Family Tree

I want to share an album that I've been quite obsessed with in the last few weeks. Nick Drake's Family Tree. I have been listening to his work for over decade, but only recently did I find the wonderful, beautiful and haunting collection on Family Tree.



I'd especially recommend tracks 13 ('Been Smoking too Long'), 19 ('Blues Run the Game'), 22 ('Kimbie'), and 25 ('Strange Meeting II').

comparing the geographies of Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian Wikipedias

As part of our efforts to map the geographies of Wikipedia (with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa), I thought that it would be worth taking a quick look at the layers of content in the Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian Wikipedias.

I'm unsure why we see more Persian focus in most of Asia (although more Arabic focus in Southeast Asia), more Hebrew focus in South America, and more Arabic focus in North America. But it is interesting that (outside of Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa) we see such distinct regional focuses for each of the encyclopaedias. Many of these patterns might be explained by immigration and emigration (e.g. the links between Ethiopia and Israel). Others (as we've seen before) can likely be explained by dedicated editors who are on a mission to create content about particular places.

If you'd like to see more detailed maps of any of these three language versions, all relevant posts are accessible here. 

the geography of klout scores - or why are the French so influential?

Most Twitter users have heard of Klout scores. These scores which fall between 0 and 100 supposedly measure influence (higher scores indicating that a person is more influential). This isn't to say that such quantification of a person's influence based on online activity is entirely unproblematic. The entire endeavour is worrying on a number of levels, and it is highly unlikely that a single number (especially a number generated using Klout's methods) could ever sum up the various ways in which influence is perceived and enacted. 

Nonetheless, I wanted to map the service in order to see how the geography of online influence (according to Klout) might vary over space. With the help of Devin Gaffney, I did just that:

Over the course of four consecutive days of polling for 30 seconds every 5 minutes from Twitter's spritzer-level of access, we collected a total of 3,598,060 geotagged tweets via the random public timeline. These geotagged tweets were then bundled into their respective countries of origin, and the resulting set of country-bundled tweets were sampled randomly for up to 1000 users. The resulting sample of users were queried using Klout's API. 

The map above shows only countries with a user sample size of more than fifty users (who publish geotagged tweets). Looking at the data, we see a very interesting amount of variation. The average score, globally, is just 26. 

France has the highest score with an average of 37.8 (taken from a sample of 837 users in the country).  

The UK (34.9), Sweden (34.8), Brasil (34.8), and Indonesia (34.2) all follow closely behind (Brazil and Indonesia are incidentally some of the world's most prolific tweeters). 

The US, which normally excels in all metrics of online visibility/power/reach comes in at 10th with an average Klout score of 33.

This isn't to say that tweets emanating from the US as a whole are not influential. The US is the world's largest source of content on Twitter. This massive amount of information, pushed through the platform, undoubtedly means that American users in the aggregate have a large amount of visibility. 

Yet it remains that they have a relatively weak average 'influence.' Nonetheless, despite the strong scores of Brasil and Indonesia, it remains that we (perhaps unsurprisingly) see that most countries in the Global South have less 'influence' than their Northern counterparts. In the list of top-20 Klout scores, there are only two countries with a GDP per capita below the world average (Indonesia and Egypt).

Kenya scores highest in Sub-Saharan Africa (in 22nd place globally) with an average Klout score of 31. Most other Sub-Saharan nations are then much lower down in the list of average influence.

This doesn't mean that there is a clear relationship between GDP (or level of 'development') and Klout scores (Australia, for instance, is in 52nd position on our list). However, with a few exceptions, poor countries tend to have relatively low scores. 

Is this because we are picking up traces of the cultural dominance of the North even in a supposedly decentralised network? (i.e. Northern tweeters might tend of have greater reach and amplification than their Southern counterparts) This finding doesn't mean much for any particular person attempting to communicate or spread a message, but still potentially sheds light on the issue of voice in the world's margins. 

On the other hand, perhaps we are just reproducing and amplifying opaque and highly problematic data. We should therefore certainly not overreach in any interpretations of these data. 

Nonetheless, I still want to know if the French truly are more influential on Twitter than everyone else? And, if so, why?

augmented zombies and aural immersiveness

Last year I wrote about zombies and massively multiplayer augmented reality role-playing games (MMARRPGs) and the potentials for fun and terror as you run around a city being pursued by augmented infestations of walking dead. But a few days ago I had the opportunity to try out a different way of populating place with the undead using a new Android app called Zombies, Run!

Zombies, Run! follows an entirely different format to the confusingly similarly named Zombie, Run! that I described in my previous post. While Zombie, Run! situates the user/runner on/in a map of their urban environment, Zombies, Run! is less spatially aware experience.

The app is essentially an ebook broken up into a series of missions (i.e. chapters) that place you at the centre of the story. You crash land into a community of survivors during the zombie apocalypse and then have to constantly run in and out of the camp for a variety of reasons: "people are shooting at you, run!", "we need supplies, run!", and of course..."zombies are getting close, run!"

To add to the fun (terror?), you can activate your phone's GPS so that the app can track your speed. This is where the the fear really kicks in. When you hear "zombie approaching. 50 metres," you have no choice but to launch into a sprint, no matter how tired you are.

There have been quite a few negative reviews of the app: mostly focusing on the fact that (unlike Zombie, Run!), you don't actually have to move to progress through the story and 'win' the game. In other words, the app doesn't really care where you are, and so doesn't live up to its potential as an augmented reality role-playing game. But I think that these critiques miss an important point.


While it is possible that the app's minimal spatial awareness is an afterthought, it remains that aural augmentation has long been the most powerful way in which we blend material and digital stimuli. The app doesn't need to be fully spatially aware to achieve its purpose (i.e. to entertain you, make you run, and terrify you). 


Ultimately it would be 'nice' if the app did place you on a map and make you run from ephemeral, yet spatially-grounded, zombies that populate your urban environment. But the apocalyptic narrative, combined with your phone's awareness of your speed, is still enough to fundamentally transform your experience of the city. This all means that I'm going to keep running with headphones in my ears; collecting supplies, going on missions; dodging zombies; and darting past people who have no idea that I'm surrounded by the living dead.

Where Do the World's Tweets Come From?

The Atlantic has just published a piece 'Where Do the World's Tweets Come From?' featuring a graphic that I made with Monica Stephens.

You can read more about our methods and interpretation at the OII's Vis Site, and have a look at some of the earlier mappings of Twitter that I've carried out with Devin Gaffney:

'Where do tweets come from (part 1)'
'Where do tweets come from (part 2)'