Network of People who Twitter about R

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.