Authors: Alberto Pepe, Sasank Reddy, Lilly Nguyen, Mark Hansen
Title: Twitflick: visualizing the rhythm and narrative of micro-blogging activity
Venue: Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference 2009
Abstract: Micro-blogging is a form of online communication by which users broadcast brief text updates, or tweets. This article explores the temporal component of micro-blogging activity by emphasizing its narrative nature: an individual tweet is an expression of personal online presence at a given time, yet it necessarily embodies the context of a broader developing story. We present Twitflick, a digital media platform that blends a continuous stream of real-time text updates from Twitter with related user-uploaded images hosted on Flickr. Twitflick acts as a space in which distributed, temporally-authentic personal narratives, in the form of photographs and text, reinforce, extend, and even misrepresent each other. The visualizations provided by Twitflick capture the quotidian rhythms of online social exchange and draw attention to the poetic potential of web 2.0.
