Ninth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

Running is turning into a very popular mass sport. CHALLENGE project aims to contribute to the understanding of whom the runners are and what are their connections to one running event. We choose the social space of the web to explore those relationships. Web 2.0 provides new insights into the ability of sports events to structure social territories. Data from Twitter are used to assess the dynamic of the WebSpace from the accounts of two iconic races: Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in France and the New York City Marathon in the United States. Web Graphs are valuable tools for exploring and queering the relationships between polarities such as hashtags, users, twitter, links, media. An innovative two-step method has been used to shape the database: capture and extraction of the web to collect twitter data (step 1), import and processing in free software analysis and visualization Gephi (step 2). Results will be presented in the form of graphs to illustrate the analysis of lexical fields and representations associated with events; and mappings to show the spatial radiation of events from the user’s account. The exploratory results highlight the emergence of a social community whose territory functions in a reticular way.