Tweets from the 218^th meeting of the AAS

Can we divine anything from the Twitter stream of the 218th meeting of the AAS?

The results presented here unfortunately do not reflect all the tweets from the meeting, but only those available via the Twitter Search API. Also, unlike my AAS 215 study I am only using the #AAS218 hashtag since #AAS is no-longer particularly astronomy-related (this link may include language or links that could be considered offensive).

• A demonstration of the Tweet Stream from AAS 218 (there's a few things left that I'd like to do, but it's about time I started playing with something else).

• A Word Cloud of the tweets up to the early-evening of Wednesday, May 25 2011. A major change to the analysis to that used below is that I know attempt to recognize common phrases (e.g. "Citizen Scientist" and many names) rather than just use single words; this is rather ad-hoc and could probably be improved.

• A Word Cloud of the tweets from the first two days of the conference (well, it also includes a few from the Sunday and doesn't quite cover all of Tuesday, May 24th);

• An archive and analysis of #AAS218 tweets using the Archivist site;

• a graphical view of the people tweeting about #AAS218.

The archivist site only gets updated once per day (this may be more frequent during the conference, once people really start tweeting) and the the visualization of links between people is limited to "recent" tweets.

Credits

The tweets used in the work presented here were extracted from Twitter using the Twitter Search API and some rather ugly Haskell code. Conversion to Word Cloud form was via the magic of WordCram; the inelegant output is *my* fault, not a fault of the library!

The online services used (other than Twitter) are the archivist by MIX online and the Twitter visualization service by Tony Hirst (@psychemedia). Thanks a bundle!

Last, but not least, thank you to all the Astronomers who used Twitter to discuss the meeting.