Mapping the connections among people who tweet #sunbelt

July 3, 2010
Marc Smith
Conference, Measuring social media, NodeXL, Social Media, Social network, Social Network Analysis, Visualization

The International Sunbelt Social Network Conference is the official conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA).

This year’s INSNA “Sunbelt” conference is at the Riva del Garda Fierecongressi, Trento, Italy! Here is the 2010 INSNA Sunbelt Program.

This is the NodeXL map of connections among people who tweeted the hashtag used for the conference “#sunbelt”.

Having now seen several of these maps for other topics and events (see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157622437066929/) this map can be placed in context. It is a small group, but has a high density of connections. It lacks isolates, the people who say the term but do not connect to others who say that term. This means that this is a very “in-group” population: if you know to use the #sunbelt hashtag, you probably connect to someone else who uses the term. It is a single major cluster of connected people, no obvious sub-graphs or clusters are visible. Not everyone is central in the graph, and those who are have a prominent role in the network science community. Here is the top ten list of #sunbelt mentioning twitter users ranked by betweeness centrality.

miriamnotten
barrywellman
memeticbrand
isidromj
drewconway
gephi
kristtina
danevans87
valdiskrebs
ciro