Social media network Analysis: TAGS to start with

I am fascinated by connections and seeing connections between things, One area that particularly intrigues me is people connecting via social media and Twitter in particular.

Where to start?
I would suggest try the brilliant tool TAGS https://tags.hawksey.info/ by Martin Hawksey (@mhawskey), it is free and collects Twitter data and puts it into a Google Sheet. I won't describe setting it up if you click on https://tags.hawksey.info/get-tags/ it takes you through the process. You will need both a Twitter and a Google account to use it, but after that it is free and the spreadsheet is stored on Google's servers.


Once set up you can just start searching, below is an image of search (entered in box 2) for #socmedhe OR #socmedhe TAGS on Twitter.

From the TAGS pull-down menu you can start your search by  Run Now!

There are a number of nice features. As two examples

• once you have it set-up there is an option to update it every hour after the initial run. This means you just leave it running and let Google do the work.
• Click on the Share button and get a shareable link for Anyone with the link can view. do this means you can visualise the  tweets using the TAGSExplorer, which gives a clickable URL (e.g. http://hawksey.info/tagsexplorer/?key=1S23uOXD-BaWX4MnShveTk3LY32II3p4wEZ4G4B-h1fg&gid=400689247 )  and you get a graph similar to the one below showing links to between people based on replies. The ones with no links to them didn't reply or were not replied to; but they may have been mentioned or retweeted.  There are also four tabs where you can list things like who tweeted using the hashtags or top hashtags associate with this hashtags.

At the bottom right-hand-side of the screen there links to add retweets or mentions. Adding mentions you can get a graph similar to the one below (mentions are the dashed line and the solid line is a reply):

There are plenty of other features to look at but I will leave them to you to play with. To get going the following may be of use:

• Link to the TAGS spreadsheet used in this example: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1S23uOXD-BaWX4MnShveTk3LY32II3p4wEZ4G4B-h1fg/edit?usp=sharing 
• Link to the interactive graph: http://hawksey.info/tagsexplorer/?key=1S23uOXD-BaWX4MnShveTk3LY32II3p4wEZ4G4B-h1fg&gid=400689247

In the next post moving TAGS to another tool Gephi to analyse the data further will be discussed.











All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with. Twitter: @scottturneruon

mini-project:Social Network analysis - fun, informative

The second in the occasional series of mini-computing projects by people in Northamptonshire.


Part of this was originally posted at: http://scottjturnerranting.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/social-network-analysis-fun-and.html

figure 1. #StarWars 30/12/15

Playing with Socioviz (socioviz.net) - a free online tool for looking at influence on twitter. The image to left show connections between tweeters using the hashtag #StarWars on the 30th December 2015 up to 6pm (GMT).

Figure 2 shows the most active tweeters for this hashtag and the most influential based on Retweets and Mentions - the four greatest influencers are picked out in the video below, showing the map evolving (speed-up 20 times).

 

figure 2

To experiment with this a bit more +The Royal Institution  has a long traditional of holding a series of Christmas Lectures  which are now televised, Dr Kevin Fong presented this years. I was curious about who the biggest influencers on twitter were for the hashtag #xmaslectures over the three days of the show. The three biggest influencers came out as @Kevin_Fong @Ri_Science @astro_timpeake, the presenter, the host organisation and one of the main guests (had to present virtually as he is on the ISS at the time of writing). The figure below shows the centre of the graph were the majority of the connections.

figure 3 #xmaslectures

To read more about this go to the tutorial by Alessandro Zonin https://alessandrozonin.wordpress.com/2015/02/20/socioviz-a-free-social-network-analysis-tool-for-twitter/.

Another example of used it for is plotting a particular tweetchat (based on hashtag) and seeing if there were groupings within the data. There was for this particular chat.

figure 4 plotting a tweetchat

Looking at certain an institution's considerable twitter links (@UniNorthants) below over a one month period (8/12/2015-8/1/2016). Different types of groups and links between groups example shown in figures 6 and 7.

figure 5 organisations twitter connections over a month

figure 6 same organisation just focussing on one group

figure 7 links between groups

All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with