Autore: admin

Twitter @reply Networks on UK General Elections #UKGE2010

Few days ago Axle Burns and the people from “Mapping online publics” posted a very interesting article about mapping the Australian election following #ausvote tweets. The idea behind that was rather good and simple: by mapping all the messages containing the conventional reply symbol (@username) one could map the conversational network surrounding a specific topic (defined by the #hashtag). Of course this methods has some limitations (clearly explained by Axle), nevertheless it can be use to produce a rough map of the conversational network.
Since some time ago we’ve downloaded (using Twapperkeeper – the same service used by Axel) all the tweets with the hashtag #ukge2010 (the “official” hashtag about Uk general elections) we have decided to do the same analysis on Uk tweets.
So we’ve got the @replies network and using gephi we counted the indegree and the betweenness centrality of the nodes. Following Axle we’ve also excluded from the visualisation itself any users who received fewer than 100 @replies.
Here you can see the result:

The size of the nodes represents the indegree value while the colour represents the betweenness centrality. This is the table showing the top values:

What can be easily noticed is that most important nodes within the conversational network are not the official twitter account from political parties or politicians. Bloggers, journalists and consultants like @carlmaxim or @bengoldacre get more direct replies than official twitter account from politicians – like @nick_clegg – or from political parties – like @UKLabour-.
This can be due to the use that those users make of Twitter, @nick_clegg or the @UKLabour probably are not perceived as someone you would reply or address directly.
At the same time it is important to highlight how there is no clear correlation between indegree and betweenness centrality, users like @bloggerheads have a high betweenness centrality value but a very low indegree. This can be surely due to a different behaviour of users (outdegree value is important in how betweenness centrality is defined) but at the same time I think that betweenness centrality, even if is a standard measure for sna, is unable to get the real complexity of a conversation network connected through a Twitter #hashtag (but we’re coming back on this point very soon).

SIGSNA goes HPC

We’ve been recently awarded of High Performance Computer resources by the CINECA – the Italian Consortium for high performance computing. We submitted an application a C class project (test and development) and now we we can use up to 20.000 CPU hours of the CINECA SP6 System.
This open a brand new scenario in our research with many interesting perspectives. The size of the network we are working with can be hardly managed with normal personal computers and even when it is possible it takes hours or even days of computation. Now we could move toward a new set of possibilities that so far have been out of our computational power. This could also move somehow the focus of our research adding some specific aspects of high performance computing and network theory.We’ve been recently awarded of High Performance Computer resources by the CINECA – the Italian Consortium for high performance computing. We submitted an application a C class project (test and development) and now we we can use up to 20.000 CPU hours of the CINECA SP6 System.
This open a brand new scenario in our research with many interesting perspectives. The size of the network we are working with can be hardly managed with normal personal computers and even when it is possible it takes hours or even days of computation. Now we could move toward a new set of possibilities that so far have been out of our computational power. This could also move somehow the focus of our research adding some specific aspects of high performance computing and network theory.

UK 2010 General Elections

We’re working on more generalised model of information propagation in Microblogging context, therefore we started playing with some Twitter data. As starting point we downloaded some data about #ge2010 (UK 2010 General election). When we noticed that some of the tweets contained the geolocalization we decided to map them using Google Visualization API. Here you can see the result.
Geo-referenced tweets about UK 2010 General Elections.
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July RoundUp

July has been a month fully packed of SIGSNA activities. At the beginning we’ve been in Oxford for the Research Methods festival [reported here] and after that we had just a few days at home and we had to fly to Gothenburg for the International Sociological Association Conference (ISA 2010). Due to the high interdisciplinary approach of the SIGSNA project we have to move through many different conferences so it might be strange to follow the line of all our presentations, but that’s the best part of it: to be able to share our research and our ideas with so many colleagues from a large variety of disciplines. During the ISA conference we presented at the RC51- Sociocybernetics session. Sociocybernetic is an interesting sociological approach rooted in the System theory and in Complexity theory; nowadays it shows a good theoretical background for a Sociological Approach to the internet studies. What’s really cool is that I won the “Walter Buckley Memorial Award for Excellence in Presenting Sociocybernetics”!!
Here you can check the slides I used during my presentation:

As soon I made my way back to Bologna I attended the International Visual Sociology Association Conference here in Bologna. Visual Sociology is a rather recent and fascinating field of research and I really wanted to show some visual hints we had from our research. So I presented a brief discussion analysing the top100 most commented pictures posted in the Italian Friendfeed durng our sampling time. Well I’m happy to say that we had a great panel there together with some friends also presenting on UGC/SNS pictures (Agnese, Marina, Alessandra, Stefania, and Fatima – and Many thanks to Giovanni and Laura, chairs of the session).
Here you can see the slides I presented during my talk:

So what’s next? July was really full of stuff and we recently received the news that the SIGSNA research has been authorised to use some of the computing resources of the CINECA supercomputer centre. I can clearly see a huge amount of work just ahead.

Keynote @WorkingCapital

A quick update just to say that we are going to give the 14.30 Keynote during the WorkingCapital Event that Telecom Italian is organizing in Bologna on June 9th. Working Capital are a series of events aimed at searching for new research and business idea. We attended the Working Capital event in Florence last year and now, less than one year after that, we are giving the keynote! Wow!

TI Working Capital blogs about us

philosophical picture
SIGSNA is a research project partially funded by Telecom Italia. TI is running a project called Working Capital aimed at findings and supporting new and interesting idea not only directly linked to business opportunity. This is an interesting opportunity in Italian scenario where research funds from private companies are quite rare.
Yesterday Telecom Italia’s blog about the Working Capital project posted the first part of a long interview with Matteo. The next part will be published on Monday.
If you are going crazy with the “who is who” game: Matteo is Popper and Luca is Hegel :).

Visualizing information spread


We are currently working on information spreading in FriendFeed context. One of the best things about SIGSNA data is that by being a comprehensive set of data of two weeks is possible to track how specific  information – identifiable by a set of keywords – spreads through the network of users. This is what we are doing tracking down the path of the news about the death of the Italian TV host Mike Bongiorno (died in Sept. 2009). The picture that you can see above shows all the Exposed users (users that directly commented AND users that saw the news but decided not to comment).
Isn’t it beautiful? We can’t say more at the moment, but in few days we are submitting a paper about that and hopefully you’ll be able to read it soon in our Data & Papers Section.