In an unexpected follow-up to last night’s post about tweeting MPs and MLAs …
When they’re not in the Dáil or attending wake houses working on constituency issues, many TDs are busy twiddling their thumbs tweeting. Earlier today Eamonn Bell published an infographic that summarises the messaging habits of TDs.
Eamonn’s number crunching (at the bottom of the infographic) goes beyond mere adoption figures and points to how TDs are exploiting the service (levels of retweets and use of hashtags) and indicating moments when TDs have collectively gone into overdrive with their tweets (around the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill debates and the white smoke rising above the Sistine Chapel to announce the election of Pope Francis).
As I suggested yesterday – and others backed up with their comments and tweets – the fact of a politician ‘having’ an account signifies very little about a politician’s intelligent use of Twitter. But Eamonn’s work is a good example of how large datasets can be brought to life to start to explore the stories they may contain.
Eamonn Bell’s infographic used under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported licence.
Alan Meban. Tweets as @alaninbelfast. Blogs about cinema and theatre over at Alan in Belfast. A freelancer who writes about, reports from, live-tweets and live-streams civic, academic and political events and conferences. He delivers social media training/coaching; produces podcasts and radio programmes; is a FactCheckNI director; a member of Ofcom’s Advisory Committee for Northern Ireland; and a member of the Corrymeela Community.
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