Redes solidarias en twitter: un acercamiento a la estructura del independentismo catalán en base a datos capturados en twitter

The study goes into the structure of the Catalan separatist movement in Twitter from a particular communicative instance. Catalan separatism has both elite-led and citizen-led movement characteristics. The central thesis of this study poses that emphasizing the citizen-led version of separatism works on the advantage of meso- or micro-sociological and comprehensive perspectives. Accordingly, the structure of a communicative network will be evaluated by means of Social Network Analysis techniques, on the basis of datum gathered from the virtual social network Twitter from the 15th to the 31st March 2014"€just after the publication of an editorial by the state-wide newspaper ABC, which asked for the illegalization of the ANC (Catalan National Assembly) and provoked great reaction of many separatists who demonstrated their solidarity towards the public leaders of the organization in Twitter. A minimalistic theoretical framework oriented to account for collective identity in virtual social networks will be presented. There will also be presented methodological aspects (e.g. how to use Twitter as a sociological analysis datum source) and substantive aspects around the object of study (e.g. on the consequences of a communicational paradigmatic change in the elaboration of collective narrations). The necessarily open and provisional conclusions empirically support the initial thesis and encourage further research towards the rethinking and resolution of some programmatic needs that emerge when studying identity dynamics out of Twitter empirical material on a systematic basis.

Análisis de Redes Sociales, Independentismo catalán, Twitter, Identidad, Solidaridad