The 2013 International Journalism Festival in Perugia had tremendous success with attendees and online followers. During the festival, more than 9,184 commentators interacted via Twitter with 43,966 individual Tweets. The major topics of interest included covering journalism, business models and the granularity of the sources and their authority, which were the subject of conversations and comments. Due to this, there was a very high level of interaction, with more than 20 thousand retweets [47% of total] and 4141 replies.
The last day of the festival saw an interview of Yoani Sanchez, Cuban blogger and symbol of criticism of the regime, by Mario Calabresi, editor of the Italian daily La Stampa. The event catalyzed interest, with the peak of tweets reached between 21:00 and 22:00, as it was interrupted briefly by pro-Castro demonstrators. The tweet by Anna Masera, social media editor of La Stampa, referred to the dignity of Sanchez during this unfortunate incident.
#ijf13 @yoanisanchez sorride con grande dignità aspetta che passi la sceneggiata. Brava twitter.com/annamasera/sta…
— Anna Masera (@annamasera) 28 aprile 2013
Thanks to the platform created by ad hoc Buzzdetector, we have produced a map of the social network analysis, which collected tens of thousands of interactions from retweets, quotes and conversations that took place during the festival.
The map of interactions shows the main links between those who have interacted on Twitter relative to the topics addressed during the event. The different colours identify the different communities and people who have most interacted with each other on the basis of a commonality of topics of interest.
At the top right is the international gathered community. It is interesting to note that international personalities such as Harper Reed were at the centre and seem to communicate and relate well with the Italian community.
As we mentioned in previous posts, the conversations involved journalists but not Italian newspapers or media organisations, which were almost absent from the interactions via Twitter, confirming the unidirectional mode of Italian newspapers [note instead the centrality of the BBC]. Even the festival sponsors, with the exception of TIM, did not seem to have taken the opportunity to communicate with the festival attendees and followers.
The data used to carry out the project analysis by BuzzFlow will soon be released into the open data format, to allow those interested to use it.
The map of #ijf13 interactions
Analysis by
Angelo Centini, data scientist for Buzzdetector
Aarti C. Thobhani, freelance journalist and festival volunteer
Matthew Renzoni, freelance data journalist
Pier Luca Santoro, expert in Communication and Media
Gianandrea Facchini, CEO and founder of Buzzdetector
Alessandro Belotti, journalist and festival volunteer