Visualization on Twitter Retweet Streams During the Boston Marathon Terror

Lee, Kyungho

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/49088 Copy

Description

Title

Visualization on Twitter Retweet Streams During the Boston Marathon Terror

Author(s)

Lee, Kyungho

Issue Date

2014-05

Keyword(s)

Informatics

Abstract

With the increasing adoption of social media such as Twitter, new opportunities for studying communication patterns and information diffusion arise. This project explores Retweet (RT) streams on Twitter during the Boston Bombings for identifying key actors and analyzing its speed, range, and structure of information diffusion. The primary data is a collection of one week crawling of RT streams that are related with Boston Marathon Bombings in the public timeline. The queries were “Boston Marathon + Bombing + Explosion” extracted from related search keywords in Google Trends. 5,677,531 tweets were collected from Mon Apr 15 to Apr 22 2013 per every 5 seconds. Among them, only 182,779 influential vertices were selected to visualize the information diffusion network due to the limitation of the space. In the visualization, the label size and color of dots (vertices) represents the importance (influence) of each actor’s in the network, the weight of lines (edges) shows the amount of information flow, and the color of edges indicates its speed. The results suggest that individuals, rather than traditional broadcast media, are playing vital roles in disseminating information. In the RT stream network, actors can be categorized into three categories as they took different roles in communication such that announcers, broadcasters, and audiences.

Type of Resource

• text
• image

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/49088

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2014 Kyungho Lee

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