A constellation of Astronomers

The graph below represents the connections between users tweeting about the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Unfortunately you need quite a large window to see it.

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

The page is updated infrequently.

Time range (EST): to

Number of accounts: ; 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 account), although I don't have this information for all users. The links between the accounts 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.