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Presentation Programming Social Networking Visualization

Part 8: Who’s Talking About The Future of Newspapers?

I’m working on a paper on topical communities, and as part of that I’ve come back to this dataset to explore the social network that emerges through @ mentions.

To start with, I looked at the social network that emerges when we look at the people on the list.

Future of the News Network
Future of the News Network

This network is pretty densely connected, with the exception of two users on the list. You can see their nodes floating away in the image below:

Future of the News Network - Outliers
Future of the News Network - Outliers

The network graph that emerges from all the tweets connected is really busy, but may show who the most engaged users are.

Future of the News Network - Full
Future of the News Network - Full

There’s just too much information here, so I started filtering it by eliminating nodes that had fewer than a specified minimum number of connections. Because of the dataset available, non-news-influencer nodes cannot be connected to each other. Thus, I was specifying how many influencers needed to mention a user for them to make it into the graph.

Future of the News Network - Minimum 2
Future of the News Network - Minimum 2

Setting the minimum to two dramatically reduces the size of the graph. Many of the nodes remaining are also well known, for example @jack and @alyssa_milano.

Future of the News Network - Minimum 3
Future of the News Network - Minimum 3

We can also see popular websites, like @techcrunch and @boingboing as well as @google (not surprising given how often google showed up in the earlier visualizations of tweet content.

Future of the News Network - Minimum 4
Future of the News Network - Minimum 4
Future of the News Network - Minimum 5
Future of the News Network - Minimum 5
Future of the News Network - Minimum 6
Future of the News Network - Minimum 6
Future of the News Network - Minimum 7
Future of the News Network - Minimum 7
Future of the News Network - Minimum 8
Future of the News Network - Minimum 8
Future of the News Network - Minimum 9
Future of the News Network - Minimum 9
Future of the News Network - Minimum 10
Future of the News Network - Minimum 10

I find the graphs for minimum 8+ fascinating – I think they start to show who influences the influencers.

Future of the News Network - Minimum 11
Future of the News Network - Minimum 11

Eventually, of course, we get back to our original graph.