On Tuesday I will be speaking to the Bay Area R group about doing social network analysis in R with igraph. During the talk I will (hopefully) be doing some live SNA on the audience using R and generating data via Twitter. As a preview, or small taste for those not able to attend, I have generated network data from the last 100 tweets—as of yesterday afternoon—that included the hash-tag #rstats.
The figure below is the 2-core of the full network. As you might imagine, the full network is quite large, but the vast majority of nodes are pendants; therefore, visualizing the 2-core is much more useful. Those that twittered with #rstats are in red and labeled, while all of the intervening nodes are in blue.
I am a bit of a wallflower in this crowd, but I am a relative newcomer to both Twitter and R so this makes sense. You can see that powerhouse gurus like @CMastication, @revodavid, @dataspora, @hamiltonulmer, etc. are very central. Also, this visualization nicely depicts the size and connectedness of the R community on Twitter. For example, the network contains only 181 nodes and has a diameter of 7. On the other hand, there are several disparate cliques around the central actors (e.g., @gappy3000 and myself form a small clique).
I look forward to digging further into the Twitter data on Tuesday, and if you are attending and have any suggestion or specific questions please let me know and I will try to work them in.
Automatically Generated Related posts:
Wish I could attend your presentation as I’m also very interested in graph visualizations of active data sources like Twitter. In fact, I put together a visualization of frequently-mentioned Twitter users and hashtags.
Check it out:
http://apps.asterisq.com/mentionmap
Are you planning to post slides and/or notes?
[Reply]
Drew Conway Reply:
November 10th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Daniel, very cool tool! In fact, much more interesting than my little data set.
As for the slides, they are already online here: http://www.drewconway.com/zia/?p=1221
[Reply]
Daniel McLaren Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Awesome, thanks for the link to the video!
[Reply]
I like your example: R, SNA tools, and readily available data where the audience has an invested interest in the nodes. Great!
[Reply]
[...] Drew Conway, who will be speaking at the meetup, at Zero Intelligence Agents did a quick analysis of the Twitterers discussing the hashtag #rstats you can see here. [...]
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