A constellation of Astronomers

The graph below represents the connections between users tweeting about the 221st meeting of the American Astronmical Society. Unfortunately you need quite a large window to see it. You should also look at the TAGSExplorer view of the data (it isn't quite the same data due to the way it is collected, and the links are slightly different, but should hopefully show the same overall features).

You can also look at a matrix view of this data.

The data collection has now stopped.

Time range (PST): to

Number of nodes: ; Number of links:

The circles represent Twitter accounts; the color is coded based on the number of followers of each account using the scale given at the top of the graph (it's also included in the mouse-over text for each node), although I don't have this information for all users. The links between the nodes identify those users who have mentioned another user in a tweet, using the @name syntax; the line widths increase based on the number of mentions but given that the graph is ever-so-slightly crowded this isn't that useful at this time. The color of the link indicates the size of the community that the link belongs to; the same scale is used in the matrix view, which also contains a brief explanation on the algorithm used to pick up these communities.

If you move your mouse over a node then you should see a pop-up giving the name of the user and the lines connected to this user are highlighted; you should probably wait for the animation to stop, or use the handy-dandy "Stop" button, before trying this.

Credits

This visualization was created using the d3.js JavaScript library, and is based on the force-directed graph example.