Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture, and Dissent – By Bruce Etling, John Kelly, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey – Internet & Democracy Case Study Series, June 2009. Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2009-06
“This study explores the structure and content of the Arabic blogosphere using link analysis, term frequency analysis, and human coding of individual blogs. We identified a base network of approximately 35,000 active Arabic language blogs (about half as many as we found in a previous study of the Persian blogosphere), discovered several thousand Arabic blogs with mixed use of Arabic, English and French, created a network map of the 6,000 most connected blogs, and with a team of Arabic speakers hand coded over 4,000 blogs. The goal for the study was to produce a baseline assessment of the networked public sphere in the Arab Middle East, and its relationship to a range of emergent issues, including politics, media, religion, culture, and international affairs.”
