30,000,000 Occupation TweetsA hashtag co-occurrence network analysis
of information flows
Jeff Hemsley, Katherine Thornton, Josef Eckert, Shawn
Walker, Robert M. Mason & Karine Nahon
Preliminary“Findings”
NSF Award #1243170INSPIRE: Tools, Models, and Innovation Platforms for Research on Social Media
#Overview
• Occupy & Question• Literature & Data• Model & Findings• Next Steps?
#Occupy
9/17 to 10/15• 21K+ Occupiers• 2300+ cities
Meetup.com
#Occupy
30,000,000 by end of 2011
Tweets: 300K to 1M a day
#Question
Are there hashtag co-occurrence patterns indicative of organizing, informing and community building in the Occupy Twitter stream from October 19th to November 5th?
Community
Informing
Organizing#Literature• Tagging as finding and filtering mechanism
– Huang, J., Thornton, K.M., and Efthimiadis, E.N. Conversational tagging in twitter. Proceedings of the 21st ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, ACM (2010), 173–178.
• Mechanism of organizing information– Chang, H.C. A new perspective on Twitter hashtag use: Diffusion of innovation theory. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and
Technology 47, 1 (2010), 1–4.
• Information sharing– Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T., and Tseng, B. Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. Proceedings of the 9 th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007
workshop on Web mining and social network analysis, ACM (2007), 56–65
• Particularly about events– Letierce, J., Passant, A., Breslin, J., and Decker, S. Understanding how Twitter is used to spread scientific messages. (2010).
• Injecting messages into an information topic stream – Huang, J., Thornton, K.M., and Efthimiadis, E.N. Conversational tagging in twitter. Proceedings of the 21st ACM conference on
Hypertext and hypermedia, ACM (2010), 173–178. – Letierce, J., Passant, A., Breslin, J., and Decker, S. Understanding how Twitter is used to spread scientific messages. (2010).
• Community building mechanism– Laniado, D. and Mika, P. Making sense of twitter. The Semantic Web–ISWC 2010, (2010), 470–485.
• Connect with like-minded individuals– Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T., and Tseng, B. Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and
1st SNA-KDD 2007 workshop on Web mining and social network analysis, ACM (2007), 56–65.
• Discussion participation & network enhancing– Letierce, J., Passant, A., Breslin, J., and Decker, S. Understanding how Twitter is used to spread scientific messages. (2010).
#Literature
• 140-character limit => expect limited or no meta-data– Huang, J., Thornton, K.M., and Efthimiadis, E.N. Conversational tagging
in twitter. Proceedings of the 21st ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, ACM (2010), 173–178.
• Occupy tweets with multiple hashtags?• “Tweak the Tweet”: hashtags as metadata
– Starbird, K., and J. Stamberger. 2010. “Tweak the Tweet: Leveraging Microblogging Proliferation with a Prescriptive Syntax to Support Citizen Reporting.”
• Target interest sub-sets with multiple tags
#Occupy #Tweetsaccount1: support from #occupySydney #solidarity @OccupyChicago: The twentysix women in this policewagon say hello! #occupychicago #occupyarrests
account2: RT@OccupyDenver Snow expected for #OccupyDenver tonight, 4-8 inches. Donations of warm clothing, etc would rock! #needsoftheoccupiers #ows
account3: #GeneralStrike to give everyone a chance to #MoveYourMoney on #Nov5
account4: What happened to #OccupyOakland and the MSM response to it is further proof we need to #OccupyTheMedia with our own Internet media outlet.
#Expectations• Hashtags as meta information for
organizing information– Informing• Location & Events• Location & Utility
– Community• Location & Location• Location & Slogan
– Meta meta• Meta & Location• Meta & Slogan
#Expectations
meta location utility slogan event
meta + o + olocation + + + + +
utility o + - o +slogan + + o -event o + +
#Data• SoMeLab data set: 30,000,000 Occupy Tweets• Tweets with 2 or more tags• Oct 20 – Nov 5, 2011
X1…Xn: tag by tag dummyY: Co-occurrence Matrix
#Analysis• Network Linear Regression• Quadratic Assignment Procedure– Proportion random trials– Test for association– T-test
X1…Xn: tag by tag dummyY: Co-occurrence Matrix
#Findings
meta location utility slogan event
meta + o + + o +location + + + + +
utility o + + - o +slogan + + o -event o + + +
• Meta: OWS is a hub and tied to everything– Volume of OWS: signaling community– Not so distributed?– OWS Power Law: other news-like social attention?
• Fire-bomb / noise / message injection
#Findings #Issues
#Future #Directions
• 3D Matrix -> meta & location & utility• Location: control for distance• Block Model• #GetAJob
