Tweets from the 221^st meeting of the AAS

Can we divine anything from the Twitter stream of the 221st meeting of the AAS?

Note that the AAS has declared #aas221 as the official hash-tag for the meeting (it's case insensitive for Twitter searches, so you can use #AAS221 too, but probably best to stick with lower case).

One new thing this year is the entrance of the hash tag #hackAAS, as there is going to be a hack day at AAS.

• How did I collect and analyze the tweets?

• A quick overview of the tweets from AAS 221.

• When did people tweet about AAS 221?

• What were the most-popular words used to describe the meeting.

• Who was tweeting, rather than listening to, the meeting? You have a long way to go to beat the AAS 219 champion tweeter, Brian Gaensler.

• A look at who talked about or to who (a constellation of Astronomers); this is similar to the TAGS Explorer view.

• An alternative view of user connections, this time using an adjacency matrix. This can show more data than the "hairball" view provided in the "Constellation" view above, but it needs more analysis on my part to really bring out this structure (if there is any).

• A new entry this year is the use of the TAGSExplorer site for #aas221 and #hackAAS. A slightly different view of the data is also available, which adds retweets (blue dashed lines) and @mentions (grey dotted lines) to the graph, but it may overwhelm your browser once the conference had got going. Note that the search for tweets containing either #aas221 or #hackaas (case insensitive) is made once every day.

  Follow these instructions to create your own and see how to combine the Google Query Language with the Tweet display.

• A graphical view of the people tweeting about #AAS221 (this only uses recent tweets so will be pretty uninteresting at this time, especially as it seems to no longer work correctly).

I have previously used the Archivist site to also track the AAS221 tweets, but they seem to have changed the service since I last looked, and the ability to automatically update the search results has been removed for now.

A look at the connections between users

Above I have mentioned two visualizations of the user interactions - the constellation (or hair ball) view and a matrix display - which are updated regularly. Below I show the same data (this time from a snap shot on Monday, January 28 2013), but viewed using version 1.0.0 of the BioFabric tool, which has users as horizontal lines and connections as vertical lines. Unfortunately the image would have to be about 50 inches wide to be readable, so this is a very scaled-down view.

This is a new (to me) presentation of the data, and I am as yet unsure of what it tells us. I think I can see a separation into "those people who just retweeted from one of the main accounts, like SPACEdotcom" and those people who interacted with multiple people, but as I'm expecting this sort of break down I could well be reading things into this visualization that aren't really there.

Click on the image to see a larger, but still scaled-down, version of the image.