Social Media

The use of the NodeXL package was not possible due to the need to purchase the professional version in order to connect to Twitter or other social media platforms. Wolfram Alpha was apparently having their own problems on their server backend as their web-based application at first seemed to successfully connect with my Facebook profile but then failed indicating their system was having trouble and to try again later. When visiting the site later the Wolfram site did not seem to connect to my Facebook profile but instead presented the below page not found message.

This led me to check out the Gephi application for Windows. After installing Gephi and then the latest version of Java I was finally able to connect to social media APIs to pull in data. Returning to my Twitter account I added this application to my authorized apps and input the necessary API keys to Gephi for it to retrieve live streaming Twitter data.

For the first test I set the “words to follow” as “#debatenight,” applied that to the Full Twitter Network, and then connected to Twitter. Tweets began to populate the data table and after allowing several minutes of data to build up I could inspect the graph showing the interconnections of the users and the contents of their tweets.

From the graph view it is possible to grab specific nodes, move them around or rearrange the positioning, and to select a node in order to then have it highlighted in the Data Table to inspect its values or content. To clean up the graph Gephi provides the ability to collapse or remove duplicate data. With that accomplished it becomes a little easier to zero in on centers of activity. 

The node with the most edges is, not surprisingly, the term used to perform the query. This node has been pulled to the far left of the graph display in the above image, making it easier to explore other relationships present within the data. Since the data was extracted using a popular hashtag trending on Twitter it contains posts from a wide variety of users and media sites who otherwise do not have strong social relationships, however.