Thought this might interest some on this list: A new article in the
journal "Information, Communication, and Society". The author, Axel
Bruns, is a professor at Queensland University.
HOW LONG IS A TWEET? MAPPING DYNAMIC CONVERSATION NETWORKS ON TWITTER
USING GAWK AND GEPHI
Abstract: Twitter is now well established as the world's second most
important social media platform, after Facebook. Its 140-character
updates are designed for brief messaging, and its network structures
are kept relatively flat and simple: messages from users are either
public and visible to all (even to unregistered visitors using the
Twitter website), or private and visible only to approved ‘followers’
of the sender; there are no more complex definitions of degrees of
connection (family, friends, friends of friends) as they are available
in other social networks. Over time, Twitter users have developed
simple, but effective mechanisms for working around these limitations:
‘#hashtags’, which enable the manual or automatic collation of all
tweets containing the same #hashtag, as well allowing users to
subscribe to content feeds that contain only those tweets which
feature specific #hashtags; and ‘@replies’, which allow senders to
direct public messages even to users whom they do not already follow.
This paper documents a methodology for extracting public Twitter
activity data around specific #hashtags, and for processing these data
in order to analyse and visualize the @reply networks existing between
participating users – both overall, as a static network, and over
time, to highlight the dynamic structure of @reply conversations. Such
visualizations enable us to highlight the shifting roles played by
individual participants, as well as the response of the overall
#hashtag community to new stimuli – such as the entry of new
participants or the availability of new information. Over longer
timeframes, it is also possible to identify different phases in the
overall discussion, or the formation of distinct clusters of
preferentially interacting participants.
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David Akin
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http://www.davidakin.com
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