Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Topic Popularity in Twitter
Cornell University Library,16 November 2011
Sebastien Ardon, Amitabha Bagchi, Anirban Mahanti, Amit Ruhela, Aaditeshwar Seth, Rudra Mohan Tripathy, and Sipat Triukose
“We present the first comprehensive characterization of the diffusion of ideas on Twitter, studying more than 4,000 topics that include both popular and less popular topics. On a data set containing approximately 10 million users and a comprehensive scraping of all the tweets posted by these users between June 2009 and August 2009 (approximately 200 million tweets), we perform a rigorous temporal and spatial analysis, investigating the time-evolving properties of the subgraphs formed by the users discussing each topic. We focus on two different notions of the spatial: the network topology formed by follower-following links on Twitter, and the geospatial location of the users.
Evolving graph conductance.
“We investigate the effect of initiators on the popularity of topics and find that users with a high number of followers have a strong impact on popularity. We deduce that topics become popular when disjoint clusters of users discussing them begin to merge and form one giant component that grows to cover a significant fraction of the network. Our geospatial analysis shows that highly popular topics are those that cross regional boundaries aggressively.”
- Read the paper [PDF]
Cool… We also do Spatial Analysis of Twitter feeds with LocoBuzz. Would be great to maybe collaborate.