Social Network analysis - fun and informative

figure 1. #StarWars 30/12/15

Playing with Socioviz (socioviz.net) - a free online tool for looking at influence on twitter. The image to left show connections between tweeters using the hashtag #StarWars on the 30th December 2015 up to 6pm (GMT).

Figure 2 shows the most active tweeters for this hashtag and the most influential based on Retweets and Mentions - the four greatest influencers are picked out in the video below, showing the map evolving (speed-up 20 times).

figure 2

To experiment with this a bit more +The Royal Institution  has a long traditional of holding a series of Christmas Lectures  which are now televised, Dr Kevin Fong presented this years. I was curious about who the biggest influencers on twitter were for the hashtag #xmaslectures over the three days of the show. The three biggest influencers came out as @Kevin_Fong @Ri_Science @astro_timpeake, the presenter, the host organisation and one of the main guests (had to present virtually as he is on the ISS at the time of writing. The figure below shows the centre of the graph were the majority of the connections.

figure 3 #xmaslectures

To read more about this go to the tutorial by Alessandro Zonin https://alessandrozonin.wordpress.com/2015/02/20/socioviz-a-free-social-network-analysis-tool-for-twitter/.

Another example of used it for is plotting a particular tweetchat and seeing if there were groupings within the data there was for this particular chat.

figure 4 plotting a tweetchat