Egyptian e-diaspora: Migrant websites without a network?

International audienceThe definition of Egyptian migration as a diaspora has been much debated and often denied. This article investigates the phenomenon of the Egyptian diaspora through an innovative approach based on an analysis of the digital activity and the presence of Egyptian connected migrants. Following the methodology of the e-Diaspora project, we found a weakly connected network of websites, with many isolated nodes, little clusterization and no authorities or hubs. The fact that the traditional approach of the e-diaspora yielded few results prompted us to follow a new research strategy combining data from Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Because of a particularly fortuitous coincidence with the Egyptian revolt, we could investigate the mobilization of Egyptian migrants in pursuit of their voting rights on the micro-blogging platform Twitter. Through Twitter data, we identified links that were not visible through traditional Web-mapping techniques, and we could observe the emergence of a transnational Egyptian community debating and fighting for a common cause