Anyone who has talked to me about my research in the last year and a half knows I’m constantly frustrated by the challenges of capturing and storing Twitter data (not to mention sharing – that’s another blog post). I hired a couple of undergrads to help me write scripts to automatically collect data and...
Read more →On Twitter, at least, most of the communication is between members of the same party. That’s not all that surprising given the polarized Congress and a slew of recent social science findings about homogeneous connections among users. I still think it’s interesting though. A couple months ago I blogged about using geometric mean instead of...
Read more →The title from this post is actually a tweet posted by Twitter user GayzzoliForever just before Tuesday night’s Rizzoli and Isles episode aired on the East Coast. I’ve been studying Twitter and watching Rizzoli and Isles for a few years, and this week I decided to give myself some time to work on a fun...
Read more →My colleagues and I will present a paper and a poster at CSCW 2013 in San Antonio in February. Both submissions are based on data we collected from Twitter around politicians and their use of social media. What’s Congress Doing on Twitter? (paper) With Jahna Otterbacher and Matt Shapiro, this paper reports our first...
Read more →My social networks reading group read De Choudury et al’s WWW’10 paper about inferring social networks from email (citation’s below) this week, and I was inspired by our discussion to calculate geometric means for Twitter mentions. You can read elsewhere about the public officials and social media project, but basically I have a bunch...
Read more →BJ Mendelson wrote a book. He called it Social Media is Bullshit so people would buy it and those who didn’t would get his point anyway. This isn’t a review of the book. You can read lots of those. Instead, this is a note-style post about stuff from BJ’s book that come up in my research (and...
Read more →My brother sent me an interesting story from NPR about how farmers are using social media to keep track of what’s happening to others’ crops, and it got me thinking about whether I could get some sort of data explorer running on the fly when a new hashtag pops up. For the Public Officials...
Read more →I’ve been lucky enough this summer to be invited to two NSF workshops. The first, the Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems (CSST) Summer Institute wrapped up last Thursday and was an incredible experience. CSST’s summer institute for doctoral students and pre-tenure faculty covers a range of topics from community-building to getting tenure...
Read more →I used the Twitter Database Server and my own Twitter-collectors to gather 42,813 tweets posted by 417 elected members of Congress (69 Senators and 348 Representatives) between December 22, 2011 and March 15, 2012. From those tweets, I made a network based on when Members of Congress mentioned each other and used NodeXL to analyze and graph the...
Read more →Many of the networks I retrieve and analysis are two-mode affiliation networks – meaning they’re networks of people connected to share objects or communities. For instance, Senators using the #gopconference hashtag on Twitter, where I’ll have an edgelist of Senators and the hashtags they use. NodeXL, my free network analysis software of choice, doesn’t currently...
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