With the emergence of the phenomenon of "Arab revolutions", the Middle East has entered a new era. The investigation of the goals of the Arab revolutions requires their pathology. The developments of the Arab world, although occurred with the self-immolation of a young Tunisian and its widespread reflection in the global media, but these events origins returns to the previous years. These count...

While people in democracies can vote their government out when they are discontent with its policies, those in dictatorships cannot do so. They can only attempt to expel the dictator via mass protests or revolutions. Based on a general cause-and-effect mechanism, the author analyzes whether such mass protests are more likely when the economic situation is poor and vote outs are more likely unde...

Within a fairly short amount of time, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has managed to put large swaths of land in Syria and Iraq under their control. To many observers, the sheer speed at which this “state” was established was dumbfounding. To better understand the roots of this organization and its supporters we present a study using data from Twitter. We start by collecting large am...

The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2011 in the small Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid, set off a sequence of events culminating in the revolutions of the Arab Spring. It is widely believed that the Internet and social media played a critical role in the growth and success of protests that led to the downfall of the regimes in Egypt and Tunisia. However, the precise mechanisms b...

This paper examines journalists‘ changing sourcing practices in the context of globalisation and developments in media technologies. It departs from Heinrich‘s concept of ―network journalism‖ that theorizes contemporary news as a product of ―a complex collaborative network of national and transnational information gatherers, producers and disseminators (...) that allows the integration of a gre...

This paper presents a method for constructing a specific type of language resources that are conveniently applicable to analysis of trending topics in time-annotated textual data. More specifically, the method consists of building a co-occurrence network from the on-line content (such as New York Times articles) that conform to key words selected by users (e.g., ’Arab Spring’). Within the netwo...