Colombo, Peace and Conflict, Politics and Governance, Reconciliation

#unlk: Archive and visualisation of tweets on Sri Lanka at HRC’s 22nd Session

The 22nd regular session of the Human Rights Council was held from 25 February to 22 March 2013 at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.

As Groundviews did with conversations on Twitter over Sri Lanka during the UPR sessions last year, we archived every single tweet from Thursday, 21st February 2013 to Tuesday, 26th March 2013 with the #unlk hashtag.

After tossing around several options for a good hashtag over email, #unlk was circulated globally by leading websites, activists, local and international HR organisations, journalists and others before the start of the HRC’s 22nd Session, to facilitate the creation of this archive.

We used Martin Hawskey’s new TAGS v5 template with Twitter’s Developer API and Google Docs to archive every single #unlk tweet.

There are 6056 tweets in the archive, which include retweets as well.

The peaks correspond to the times and dates which either the #unlk hashtag was promoted globally as a means to capture conversations around sri Lanka at the HRC, when a Government representative was speaking at the sessions in Geneva and when Sri Lanka was being discussed at the Sessions or during a side event. The final peak is around the time the US Resolution was taken up for voting at the HRC.

Top tweeters during the time #unlk was active are shown below.

Download the archive as an Excel spreadsheet here.

A completely searchable archive of the tweets, hosted online, can be accessed here or by clicking the image below.

Screen Shot 2013-03-27 at 11.00.11 AM

A data visualisation of the 6,000+ tweets can be viewed here, or by clicking the image below. Be warned – given the size of the archive, the visualisation will consume a lot of CPU and memory resources. Opening this on anything other than a very powerful PC or Mac with lots of RAM will possibly crash your browser.

Screen Shot 2013-03-27 at 11.05.38 AM