Earlier this year I doodled a recipe for comparing the folk commonly followed by users of a couple of BBC programme hashtags (Social Media Interest Maps of Newsnight and BBCQT Twitterers). Prompted in part by a tweet from Michael Smethurst/@fantasticlife about generating an ESP map for UK politicians (something ... [Read more...]

Last week, @3wen (Ewen) helped me to write nice R functions to extract tweets in R and build datasets containing a lot of information. I've tried a couple of time on my own. Once on tweet contents, but it was not convincing and once on the activit... [Read more...]

  While Tsipras and his Syriza coalition have been busy in Greek parliament, the Internet has been a-buzz with speculation that their platform will result in a Greek exit from the Euro currency.  This prospect, affectionately dubbed “Grexit” by Citi… Read more › [Read more...]

  The NATO summit is currently being held in Chicago, and, as is typical for NATO or G# summits, the streets and tweets are full of dissent.  In the spirit of my past investigations of online dissent (#jan25, #25bahman, #12fev,… Read more › [Read more...]

Let’s say you’ve used my Python script to automate the download of a hashtag or search phrase from Twitter (in a Unicode safe way, unlike within R).  Now let’s say you want to visualize the number of tweets over time.  Easy… Read more › [Read more...]

How can we represent conversations between a small sample of users, such as the email or SMS converstations between James Murdoch’s political lobbiest and a Government minister’s special adviser (Leveson inquiry evidence), or the pattern of retweet activity around a couple of heavily retweeted individuals using a particular ... [Read more...]

In honor of Twitter making the decision to come to Detroit, here’s a special post on how I became a Twitter user. … At 3:30pm my wife called me. There was a shooting where my brother-in-law works at UPMC Western... [Read more...]

pie( table( whence.i.tweet )) qplot( whence ) + coord_polar() pie( log( table( whence )))+RColorBrewer ggplot (see below) plot( density( tweets.len )) qplot(... stat="density") + geom_density qplot(...stat="bin") + geom_text(...) tweeple tweep... [Read more...]

We are currently experiencing an extremely hot month in Montréal (and more generally in North America). Looking at people having a beer, and starting the first barbecue of the year, I was wondering: if we asked people if global warming was a good ... [Read more...]

People voice about Lynas Malaysia through Twitter Analysis with R CloudStat: CloudStat Analysis: This is a twitter analysis report for “Lynas” from 21 till 28 February 2012, generated by CloudStat Twitter Application. Lynas was a hot topic, espec... [Read more...]

A couple of weeks ago I saw a great example of an open learning blogpost from @katy_bird: Generating a word cloud (or not) from a Twitter hashtag. It described the trials and tribulations associated with trying to satisfy a request for the generation of a wordcloud based on tweets ... [Read more...]

I recently began using the TwitteR package in R to examine my tweeting patterns. One of my first projects was to identify each of my Twitter followers, where they were located, how many tweets they had, and then plot their location on a map using a bubble which was related ... [Read more...]

What’s the potential audience size around a Twitter hashtag? Way back when, in the early days of webs stats, reported figures tended to centre around the notion of hits, the number of calls made to a server via website activity. I forget the details, but the metric was presumably ... [Read more...]

  Last year, I covered a number of the so-called “Twitter protests” in China (#cn220), Iran (#25bahman), and Algeria (#fev12).  Since these protests began in January 2011, the Arab Spring has claimed many members of both ruling and revolting groups … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I grabbed independent samples of 1500 recent users of the #newsnight and #bbcqt hashtags within a minute or two of each other about half an hour ago. Here’s who’s followed by 25 or more of the recent hashtaggers in each case. Can you distinguish the programmes each audience interest projection ... [Read more...]

I wrote a little function to make a personalized map of who follows you or who you follow on Twitter. The idea for this function was inspired by some plots I discussed in a previous post. I also found a lot of really useful code over at flowing data he... [Read more...]

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Earlier today, I saw a post vis the aggregating R-Bloggers service a post on Using Text Mining to Find Out What @RDataMining Tweets are About. The post provides a walktrhough of how to grab tweets into an R session using the twitteR library, and then do some text mining on ... [Read more...]

This post shows an example on text mining of Twitter data with R packages twitteR, tm and wordcloud. Package twitteR provides access to Twitter data, tm provides functions for text mining, and wordcloud visualizes the result with a word cloud. … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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