Computer-Aided Content Analysis of Digitally Enabled Movements

With the emergence of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements, interest in the study of movements that use the Internet and social networking sites has grown exponentially. However, our inability to easily and cheaply analyze the large amount of content these movements produce limits our study of them. This article attempts to address this methodological lacuna by detailing procedures for collecting data from Facebook and presenting a class of computer-aided content analysis methods. I apply one of these methods in the analysis of mobilization patterns of Egypt's April 6 youth movement. I corroborate the method with in-depth interviews from movement participants. I conclude by discussing the difficulties and pitfalls of using this type of data in content analysis and in using automated methods for coding textual data in multiple languages.