1. Prof. Dr. Dagmar Monett Díaz
Talk at the Interdisciplinary Workshop “UNDER CONSTRUCTION.
Analyzing Postcolonial Weblogs with Literary and Computational Methods”
Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Retrospective and Perspectives
based on the First Bloggers Survey
Understanding the
Cuban Blogosphere
monettdiaz @dmonett
http://www.monettdiaz.com

2. 2
Definition of the
Cuban
blogosphere
by Garrincha
June 13th 2008
Image  http://losmickeysdemiami.blogspot.de/2008/06/de-los-amigos.html

3. 3Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Image © Stuart Miles at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/
What is
a blog?

4. 4Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
What is
a Cuban
blog?
Image © Stuart Miles at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/
?

5. 5Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
 Previous work
 The first survey to Cuban bloggers
 Collecting and processing data
- Open source technologies
 Analyzing and visualizing data
 Live demo
 Results with comments on both future
perspectives and practical research
Agenda

6. 6Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
- Blogger since 2007
- Chair and organizer of
Blogging Cuba: The first Cuban Bloggers Meeting
August 14th-16th, 2009, Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Main topic: “The Cuban Blogosphere and its impact in
culture, society, politics and media”
Background

7. 7Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
D. Monett
State of the Cuban blogosphere.
Results of the first survey to Cuban bloggers
In B. Calvo Peña (Ed.)
Buena Vista Social Blog. Internet and freedom of expression in Cuba
pp. 59–83, Aduana Vieja, Valencia, Spain, 2010
ISBN: 978-84-96846-41-8
(In Spanish)
Previous work

8. 8Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
D. Monett, B. Calvo
A Portrait of the Cuban Bloggers based on
the First Survey of the Cuban Blogosphere
In Proceedings of the Participatory Communication Research Section
28th IAMCR International Conference on
Communication and Citizenship - Rethinking Crisis and Change
Braga, Portugal, July 18th-22th, 2010
Previous work

9.  Word cloud: www.wordle.net
The content with Wordle
9Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014

10. The first bloggers survey

11. 11Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
1st survey to Cuban bloggers
Chapters, topics:
1. Internet connection and electronic devices
2. Blogs and blogging in general
3. Blogging platforms, tools and technical features
4. Cuba as topic on the blogs and bloggers’
interactions
5. Identity construction through blogging
6. Some other demographic data for general
statistics
(More than 100 questions - to gather as much information as possible)
online/offline, June 2009

12. Image © Stuart Miles at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/
Collecting and processing…

13. 13Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Notifications
Image © photoraidz at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/
• 5 bloggers, about 2 hours each

14. 14Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Notifications
• List with more than 1000 URLs of
alphabetically ordered Cuban blogs
Image © photoraidz at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/
• 5 bloggers, about 2 hours each

15. 15Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014

16. 16Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Notifications
• List with more than 1000 URLs of
alphabetically ordered Cuban blogs
Image © photoraidz at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/
• Contact to bloggers: manual process
• 5 bloggers, about 2 hours each

17. 17Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014

18. 18Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Logos © http://www.phpmyadmin.net/, http://blog.monitor.us/2012/04/how-to-improve-html-performance/,
http://inspiredtalents.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/javascript.png, http://www.mysql.com,
http://goodlogo.com/extended.info/apache-software-foundation-logo-3074, http://www.php.net
Managing data - open source tech

19. 19Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Managing data - open source tech
Images © Double-J Design, Oxygen Team, Hopstarter, Treetog ArtWork at http://www.iconarchive.com/
1
50+
10+
www.lahuelladelblog.com
v4.0.10
DB client v5.5.35
PHP extension for MySQL v4.1+
Database server
Percona v5.0.92

20. 128 tables
4,3 MB
(structure & data)
20
The database

21. 21Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Data processing
 95% online answers; 5% email or hard copy
 5 questionnaires discarded (no ethics and
common sense hold)
 Data cleansing & organization
 84.49% response rate (roughly estimated):
%100
rBloggerAvgBlogsPe
logsContactedB
ysValidSurve
ionParticipat 
%49.84%100
3
838
236


22. 22Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Image © adamr at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/
Data analysis and visualization

23. 23Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Data analysis
 Which primary and secondary questions?
 Which filters?
 Which charts?
 How to visualize results?
 How to draw conclusions?
 How to prepare communication of results?

24. 24Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Data analysis
 Which primary and secondary questions?
 Which filters?
 Which charts?
 How to visualize results?
 How to draw conclusions?
 How to prepare communication of results?
I wish I could attend the Google MOOC
“Making Sense of Data”, April 2014, before… ;-)

25. 25Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
 Product: Website or Intranet App
for 1 Webserver, 1 non-commercial Website, 1 developer
 Version 3.1.1, April 10th 2009
 More than 40 chart types
 66,64 € by August 2009
(current version: about 300,- €)
Data visualization
Image © and more at http://www.fusioncharts.com/ CEO and founder Pallav Nadhani

27. 27Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Data visualization process
See more at http://www.fusioncharts.com/dev-resources/javascript-charts-in-php/
Connect to data
source and query
prepare and execute
MySQL query
data, rows
Produce chart data
convert rows into
XML (or JSON) data string
Generate HTML and JS code
to embed on the Website
render chart HTML by
including
PHP script

28. Image © Stuart Miles at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/
Some…

29. 29Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Processing and visualizing results
Images © Double-J Design, Oxygen Team, Hopstarter, Treetog ArtWork at http://www.iconarchive.com/
www.lahuelladelblog.com/
128 tables, 4,3 MB
(structure & data)

30. 30Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Dilbert  Scott Adams at http://dilbert.com/fast/2008-05-08/
(Educational/Classroom usage permission is granted by Universal Uclick. All Rights Reserved)
How “intelligent” can
Artificial Intelligence be? Take care!
Analysis of results

31. 31Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Live demo
http://www.lahuelladelblog.com/Resultados/Index.php
 Live, interactive 2D/3D charts with survey results
 Column and bar charts
 Stacked and multi-series charts
 Pie charts
 …

32. 32Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Type of connection

33. 33Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Type of connection
Internet usage in Cuba is controlled by
the Government.
Discrepancy is penalized.
Private access is almost nonexistent.

34. 34Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Online activities (in Cuba)

35. 35Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Online activities (in Cuba)
Commenting
Reading news
Photo sharing
Emails
Chats
Social networks
For many Cubans: main source of
“alternative, non-official” information
and its sharing (spreading opinions)

36. 36Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Online activities (outside)

37. 37Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Online activities (outside)
Commenting
Reading news
Listening music
Emails
Video watching
Social networks

38. 38Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Online activities (outside)
88,1%
Almost all topics are highly polarized and
politicized… Comments analysis would
drive semantic-based algorithms for sure!
Commenting

39. 39Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Motivations for blogging…
Why do the Cuban bloggers blog?
What are their motivations?

41. Document personal experiences
Knowledge & experience sharing
Search for information & up to date
For a fair cause
Therapy, relief/freedom
Freedom of expression
Sharing non-censored information
Networking

42. Document personal experiences
Knowledge & experience sharing
Search for information & up to date
For a fair cause
Therapy, relief/freedom
Freedom of expression
Sharing non-censored information
Networking
How to consider this when using
Machine Learning (ML) algorithms?
How a semantic analysis?
Image © renjith krishnan at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/

43. Document personal experiences
Knowledge & experience sharing
Search for information & up to date
For a fair cause
Therapy, relief/freedom
Freedom of expression
Sharing non-censored information
Networking

44. 44Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Blogging “for a fair cause”
 Word cloud: www.wordle.net
Cuba, freedom, democracy, freedom of expression

45. 45Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Blogging for a fair cause
 Word cloud: www.wordle.net. Image © renjith krishnan at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/
Cuba, freedom, democracy, freedom of expression
Over 60% answered they are “citizens of
the world”. Over 85% of are 30+ years old
( 42+). How does this relate to their
motivations for blogging? How ML?

46. 46Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Topics to write about
- Personal
- Politics
- Art
- News
- …

47. 47Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
68% of the bloggers emigrated from Cuba.
(In the Cuban case, not only) the country
of residence might add a strong bias when
mining and analysing the data!
Topics to write about

48. 48Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Storage platform/service

49. 49Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Storage platform/service
Data Mining, Machine Learning,
Sentiment Analysis, and so on?
Consider e.g. Blogger API v3 and don’t
forget to analyze comments to posts!

50. “The Cuban blogger is a man but there is more than one woman for
every three of them. He writes from inside and outside Cuba on blogs of
a personal nature but rather he reads about politics. He is more than 40
years old, has finished university studies, is married, has at least one
child, and his main motivation for blogging is to express himself freely.
He connects via modem to the Internet and has been accessing the
Internet for more than five years but less than 10. Once logged in from his
home or work, he prefers reading news and sending emails, while he
authors an average of three blogs that are hosted on Blogger.com. He
does not like to moderate comments because he prefers freedom of
expression but sometimes he applies censorship. He was born in Cuba,
is a citizen of the world, and lives abroad. He welcomes anonymity, has
made many new friends through blogging, and publishes his posts at
night. He believes that blogging is a form of journalism, would continue to
blog in the future, and believes in blogs as a meeting point for the Cuban
nation, which for him is ‘everything’.”
50
What we got…
Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Monett & Calvo 2010

51. “The Cuban blogger is a man but there is more than one woman for
every three of them. He writes from inside and outside Cuba on blogs of
a personal nature but rather he reads about politics. He is more than 40
years old, has finished university studies, is married, has at least one
child, and his main motivation for blogging is to express himself freely.
He connects via modem to the Internet and has been accessing the
Internet for more than five years but less than 10. Once logged in from his
home or work, he prefers reading news and sending emails, while he
authors an average of three blogs that are hosted on Blogger.com. He
does not like to moderate comments because he prefers freedom of
expression but sometimes he applies censorship. He was born in Cuba,
is a citizen of the world, and lives abroad. He welcomes anonymity, has
made many new friends through blogging, and publishes his posts at
night. He believes that blogging is a form of journalism, would continue to
blog in the future, and believes in blogs as a meeting point for the Cuban
nation, which for him is ‘everything’.”
51
What we got…
What would computational
methods get?
How much do you trust (your)
“intelligent” algorithms?
Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Monett & Calvo 2010
Interdisciplinary research needed!

52. 52
Definition of the
Cuban
blogosphere
by Garrincha
June 13th 2008
Image  http://losmickeysdemiami.blogspot.de/2008/06/de-los-amigos.html
Yes, we can partially understand why...
It remains a really big challenge (not only)
for current computational methods!

53. Prof. Dr. Dagmar Monett Díaz
Heidelberg University, Germany, July 11, 2014
Retrospective and Perspectives
based on the First Bloggers Survey
Understanding the
Cuban Blogosphere
monettdiaz @dmonett
http://www.monettdiaz.com