A female supporter of the leading reformist Iranian presidential candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, flashes a victory sign with her green painted hand, in a street electoral campaign rally in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, June 6, 2009. Mousavi is leading reformist challenger to the hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the Iranian presidential race on June 12, and green is Mousavi's campaign color, a symbol of Islam and progress in Iran. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

I’m spending this summer as a research assistant at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society along with two fellow SIPA students, Lauren Klein and Scott Hartley.

Berkman is home to an array of projects, several of which focus on Internet in the developing world. The Iranian presidential elections, held last Friday and currently being hotly contested by opposition supporters, have sparked a series of publications on the role new media is playing in Iranian politics.

Last week, Berkman’s Internet and Democracy Project announced their updated research on the Persian blogosphere, which examines the Iranian blog landscape on the eve of the 2009 election:

Based on our monitoring of the Iranian blogosphere on election eve, it looks like Mousavi has broader support in the online blog community than Ahmadinejad. (For a broader understanding of the different attentive clusters in Iran check out our new online interactive Iran blogosphere map)…. It’s pretty interesting to see the contrast between Ahmadinejad (emtedadmehr.com), whose links are very concentrated in the Conservative Politics cluster, and Mousavi (mirhussein.com), whose links come from all over the map, not just the reformist politics group.

Partially inspired by the new Internet & Democracy Project research, Scott wrote an analysis of what Google Trends — which tracks search trends around the world — might tell us about the Iranian presidential election:

Over the past 90 days, Farsi-language Google searches for “Ahmadinejad” have increased by 350 percent, “election” by 950 percent, “Mousavi” by 1,300 percent, and “debate” (as in the televised ones between candidates) by what Google Insights for Search — a site that allows you to compare global search volumes — calls “breakout” proportions.

…Within Iran, it is telling that Mousavi has had a greater share of the English-language search volume in the last 30 days, while Ahmadinejad dominates searches in Persian. This might be because Mousavi, who has been touted as a reformist candidate, appeals to a demographic more likely to speak English. Consistent with this pattern, Mousavi’s search-query strongholds are in Tehran and Shiraz — places where you’re more likely to find urban elites. Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad’s appeal is highest among those less likely to have English as their default Internet browser language. Ahmadinejad remains a big player in all prominent Iranian cities but only completely dominates the less-cosmopolitan cities of Qom, Karaj, and Mashhad.

After the election, the OpenNet Initiative, which is where I’m spending most of my time, published a report on Iran’s blocking of critical communication tools — including various Web sites, text message services and, at one point, all cell phone networks — during election weekend:

The Internet and mobile phones have taken on a major role in Iranian politics over the last several months. As protests over the contested election results continue in Iran, the government has dramatically increased its control over digital technologies. Many important Web sites have been blocked over the past couple of days, including the Web sites of the opposition parties in Iran, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. While political organizers have learned to leverage the organizing power of Web 2.0 tools, government censors in Iran are quick to shut them down when they are most effective.

For ongoing information on the Iranian elections, check out the #iranelection hashtag on Twitter. SIPA professor Gary Sick is also tracking recent election news on his blog.