Dear AoIR’ers, This is admittedly a longshot, but its worth a try. I have been a member on this list since only 2 months ago, and have loved finding a community of people that are as interested in studying the Internet and all its implications as much as I have been over the past few years. I am in my final year at Bennington College in beautiful Vermont, and I have quite an interesting project underway. I wanted to share it with you and also reach out to anybody else on this list they may be interested in working with me on this project. I have been studying how the Internet changes the dynamics of citizen activism, and have written papers on the 1997 Ottawa Land Mine Treaty and the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. Recently, I’ve shifted specifically to the Middle East, studying the Kefaya movement in Egypt, the widespread use of blogs in general, and the proliferation of ICT’s in the region. So here it is: I have amassed about 750,000 tweets tied to 80,000 ish user accounts on Twitter, all with the #iranelection tag on the messages. I plan on creating a massive database of information and analytical tools so that people like us can empirically determine how something like the protests in Iran over the summer can spontaneously generate, and to what extent something like Twitter can augment or even shape conflicts like these. The paper will focus on studying major players on Twitter during the election, talk about the fascination or perhaps obsession with amateur information (a la “The Cult of the Amateur”) as was witnessed following the expulsion of “traditional” journalists, and certainly delve deep into the data, and provide some insights as to what this situation can teach us for the future. At my school, we are given the opportunity to spend the months of January and February working in the field. In our final years, we can opt for an independent study, and so long as it is outlined properly and there are clear objectives, we are given a lot of latitude. I would love to work with anyone, basically anywhere, on forming the important questions, developing sections of the paper, and collaborating to create a meaningful piece with an incredible amount of data. If you’re at any university, if you have been working in the field for a while, or if you’re just interested, I would love to hear from you. I would love to find someone wiling to advise me on this independent study during the winter, and would be willing to basically do anything to make it work for you. Here’s the catch: paperwork is due on the 30th, so we’d have to move quick. This is a silly way to introduce myself to AoIR, and I apologize if this is all presumptuous and the sort of crap some young 20-something would say to a whole bunch of people with much more experience. I am just enthusiastic about all this, and hope I find other that are interested in this project. Let me know. Also, I’m going to keep building this database, hopefully past the million tweet mark, and try to completely reconstruct the Twitter storm if possible. If you want the data, you just let me know, and I'm more than happy to collaborate. Thank you very much if you’ve read this far, Devin Gaffney 1 College Drive Bennington, VT 05201 USA C: (503)-319-2931 E: DGaffney@Bennington.edu