Is there a digital poetics of democracy? How has Twitter changed the political rhetoric of nations such as Spain, Portugal, and Greece, that have seen the emergence of new, digitally-centered grassroots political parties? How does Twitter produce a new language of power and opposition? This talk analyzes Twitter data from Spain’s Podemos and Ciudadanos, and Portugal's LIVRE! grassroots political parties for their most commonly tweeted parts of speech (verbs, adverbs, adjectives, nouns) and hastags. I will begin with a brief discussion of the very notion of a digital poetics and of Twitter as a form of digital opposition and power, describe how I have used Python and the Stanford Parser to analyze and tag the parts of speech and hashtags from these parties' tweets, and share my findings. The goal of this study is to begin to examine what might be construed as a digital poetics of democracy, power, and opposition in 21st century Spain and Portugal and to consider how this rhetoric differs from that of other, traditional political communications.
