Tweets from the 221st meeting of the AAS

Can we divine anything from the Twitter stream of the 221st meeting of the AAS?

Note that the AAS has declared #aas221 as the official hash-tag for the meeting (it's case insensitive for Twitter searches, so you can use #AAS221 too, but probably best to stick with lower case).

One new thing this year is the entrance of the hash tag #hackAAS, as there is going to be a hack day at AAS.

I have previously used the Archivist site to also track the AAS221 tweets, but they seem to have changed the service since I last looked, and the ability to automatically update the search results has been removed for now.

A look at the connections between users

Above I have mentioned two visualizations of the user interactions - the constellation (or hair ball) view and a matrix display - which are updated regularly. Below I show the same data (this time from a snap shot on Monday, January 28 2013), but viewed using version 1.0.0 of the BioFabric tool, which has users as horizontal lines and connections as vertical lines. Unfortunately the image would have to be about 50 inches wide to be readable, so this is a very scaled-down view.

This is a new (to me) presentation of the data, and I am as yet unsure of what it tells us. I think I can see a separation into "those people who just retweeted from one of the main accounts, like SPACEdotcom" and those people who interacted with multiple people, but as I'm expecting this sort of break down I could well be reading things into this visualization that aren't really there.

Click on the image to see a larger, but still scaled-down, version of the image.

[A lot of horizontal and vertical lines, drawn at a scale where it is hard to make out the details]

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