Flow140: Tracing the Flow of Conversations

Ramine Tinati rt506@ecs.soton.ac.uk Web and Internet Science University of Southampton

Research Overview
Social Networks such as Twi2er oer a pla5orm for individuals to create and share messages, establish friendships between each other, and even become part of specic communiAes. Twi2er has enabled a range of important social acAvity to succeed, including idenAfying public health issues and more recently, as a pla5orm for social and poliAcal change. However, in spite of this, the volumes of messages that are transmi2ed per day make idenAfying valuable content from the back cha2er and ulAmately, inuenAal individuals from spam, dicult. Flow140 enables exploraAon into the dynamics of conversaAons between users within a Twi2er network in real-Ame or using historic data. Problems with analyzing and visualizing such large amounts of informaAon are overcome a ltering soluAon based on characterisAcs that individuals exhibit within the network, and the ow of a conversaAon.

The Classification of Twitter Users

Flow140 was based upon the desire to be able to visualize a growing network of communicaAons within the Twi2er service. IniAal Project Aims: Can we capture how valuable informaAon ows in a conversaAon? Can we iden*fy specic characterisAcs of individuals? Can we visualise it? Tracing the ow of informaAon based on specic criteria: Where does the valuable informaAon originate from? The Idea Starter How does the informaAon ow in a conversaAon? The Amplier How can valuable informaAon cross streams? The Curator

Demonstration: Filtered vs. Unfiltered Retweet Conversation Stream

Fig 2. Filtered Retweet Network Fig 1. Unfiltered Retweet Network Figure 1 represents the retweet network for #nov9 as a at network, in its original, unltered state. Figures 1 a-c are visualizaAons of the network of individuals (the nodes) and the retweets (the edges) showing the dynamic growth of the network. This unltered state provides very li2le observaAonal informaAon or analyAcal detail. Even during the early stage of the conversaAons (Fig1.a) the idenAfying the ow of informaAon is dicult and the rapid growth of the communicaAons makes it dicult to idenAfy specic individuals and their roles. For example the network clusters that were idenAable before the protest on the 3rd November become impossible to disAnguish by the 9th November. Figure 2 shows how our tools ltering algorithm reduces the complexity of the network by concentraAng on the communicaAons between individuals exhibiAng certain network characterisAcs of interest (e.g. retweeAng) to handle these data at scale Figures 2 a-d represent the growth of the same network as Figure 1, but this Ame with the lter applied, providing a clearer view of the structure and growth of the network. First observaAons of the network idenAfy a number of users whose presence was constant throughout the growth of the conversaAons. These users, represented by the red nodes, are individual that iniAated the conversaAons that led to the ow of informaAon; the node size is determined by the number of Ames they were iniAators.

(a) 21:00 Nov 3rd 2011

(a) Retweet Network as of Nov 3rd 2011

(c) 21:00 Nov 8rd 2011

(b) Retweet Network as of Nov 6rd 2011

(d) 09:00 Nov 9rd 2011

(c) Retweet Network as of Nov 9rd 2011

(e) 21:00 Nov 9rd 2011