Visualizing Communication on Social Media: Making Big Data Acessible

Visualizing Communication on Social Media:

Making Big Data AccessibleKarissa McKelvey, Alex Rudnick

Michael Conover and Filippo Menczer

Center for Complex Networks and Systems ResearchSchool of Informatics and Computing

Indiana University, Bloomington

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Can we use social media as laboratories for social

science?

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Social Scientists

Computer Scientists

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Enables the study of discourse in large-scale social media by collecting, analyzing, classifying, visualizing, and modeling massive streams of public micro-blogging data

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#tcot

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Meme

Hashtag

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Meme

Hashtag

User

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Meme

Hashtag

User

URL

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Meme

Hashtag

User

URL

Phrase

celebrities

spam

astroturf

politics

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politics

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#tcot

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celebrities

politics

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@barackobama

celebrities

spam

astroturf

politics

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@bek_rt

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network structure

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political affiliation

network structure

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political affiliation

language detection

network structure

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sentiment

political affiliation

language detection

network structure

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Existing visualizations

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New Visualizations

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New Visualizations

Interactive Meme Diffusion Network

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#tcot

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#tcot#tcot

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#tcot#tcot

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#tcot#tcot

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#tcot#tcot

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#tcot#tcot

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#tcot#tcot

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#tcot#tcot

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#usa

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New Visualizations

User Data Exploration Interface

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Future Work

Time

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Future Work

Space

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Future Work

Feedback

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ThanksPapers at cnets.indiana.edu/groups/nan/truthy

Sandro Flammini

Bruno Conçalves

Jacob Ratkiewicz

Lilian Weng

Mike Conover

Johan Bollen

Przemek Grabowicz

Mark Meiss

Alex Vespignani

Alex Rudnick

Luca Aiello

Filippo Menczer

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Karissa McKelveykrmckelv@indiana.edu

rissarae.net@krmckelv

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Content injection• Please follow @username for an outstanding progressive voice!

#p2 #dems #prog #democrats #tcot

• Couple Aborts Twin Boys For Being Wrong Gender .. http://bit.ly/xyz #tcot #hhrs #christian #tlot #teaparty #sgp #p2 #prolife

Importance of content stream (hashtagtag) t in group A

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Predicting Political Alignment

1000 manually labeled users

Features AccuracyText (TF-IDF) 79%

Hashtags 91%

Retweet network 95%

Tags + Network 95%

LSA (users-tags)

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Cross-ideological interactions

Valence of a hashtag

#dems#p2#healthcare#dreamact

#sgp#twisters#foxnews#abortion

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Competition for attention

• Some memes go viral, most do not• Is this due to intrinsic value of memes?

User activity, popularity, influence? Topic persistence? Homophily? External media?...

#jan25