Mapping the Cuban Blogosphere

• In Event: Social movements and the use of Internet

Abstract

This study explores the structure of the Cuban blogosphere using link analysis and describes social relations between bloggers. We examine blog communities by analyzing the network structure of their blogrolls and by surveying some bloggers directly. We identify 2.554 blogs wrote by people living in-and- outside the Island and by people whom blogs about Cuba. We investigate how blogs facilitate communication between communities with different political orientations and identify cross-ideological discussions between two main poles. We also propose a broader concept of Cuban blogosphere, which includes blogs edited by people outside Cuba and by non-Cuban bloggers. Finally, we present some experiences on process of democratization of political participation that take place on the virtual public sphere. We use Gephi and Fruchterman-Rheingold algorithm as the main tool to visualize the network; we analyze the graph with Networkx and we use Blondel and Infomap to detect communities.

Author

• Elaine Díaz Rodríguez, Universidad de La Habana