Web 2.0

The Paralympic games have come a long way from the earliest event in 1960 which was held in Rome exclusively for war veterans and attracted participation of 400 athletes from 23 countries. The London Paralympic games 2012 saw participation of 4,200 athletes from 147 countries, taking part in 21 sports. The International Paralympic Committee has defined six disability categories across physical and intellectual disabilities. This are: Amputee, Cerebral Palsy, Intellectual Disability, Wheelchair, Visually Impaired and Les Autres (athletes who do not fall under the other five categories). In this blog we will explore how Paralympic games were tweeted. We collected Twitter data with the hashtag #paralympics via 140kit.

A sample of 82,560 tweets across 54,522 users was collected between Aug 30th and Sept 6th 2012. The table below lists the overall statistics of the top ten measures with regard to language, source application from where the Tweet originated, location and hashtag. The network graph was created of the entire network of users who retweeted as well as mentioned one another. In this dataset, there were 48,956 nodes and 38,959 edges. There were 42,881 retweets, 229 mentions, 546 average followers, 354 average friends and 113 average favourites. The figure below gives the network graph of the network of users created using Gephi. Each dot in the graph is a network node and corresponds to the Twitter account of a user. The links are the edges and corresponds to the users who retweeted one another or those who mentioned one another. 

Overall Statistics

 Network Graph 1 

 Network Graph 2  

English was the language of choice for people tweeting about the Paralympic games making up about 97% of the sample. An exact similar trend was observed in an earlier study using Olympic tweets. This was followed by other languages such as Dutch, Spanish, German, French and Swedish. Tweets arising from Twitter for BlackBerry constituted about 27% of the total tweets followed by Web based Tweets (27%), Twitter for iPhone (15%), Twitter for Android (13%) followed by the rest. This indicates that more people were tweeting about the Paralympic Games through mobile devices. Most of the tweets are arising from Europe, followed by North America. London leads the list, followed by Amsterdam, Casablanca and Hawaii. Analysing the hashtags used reveals that #teamGB is the most used followed by #paralympics, #London2012 and #inspirational. Team Great Britain seems to be the most popular team.