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2011 State of the Union: Mapping the connections among Twitter users who tweet about SOTU

The United States State of the Union address this year was held Tuesday evening, 25 January 2011.

The event is a globally visible opportunity for the President of the United States to present the Administration’s vision for its agenda for the year to the people of the US and the world.

The hashtag #stateoftheunion was very active in Twitter.

This is a NodeXL map of the connections among people who tweeted the string “stateoftheunion” on 21 January, 2011.

20110121-NodeXL-Twitter-stateoftheunion highlighted top between user

The most between user, @keitholbermann, is highlighted.  Two major clusters emerge, shown arbitrarily here as green and blue, and which are more clearly seen in the filtered graph below the list.

Summary network statistics:

Graph Type Directed
Vertices 1259
Unique Edges 8014
Edges With Duplicates 544
Total Edges 8558
Connected Components 306
Single-Vertex Connected Components 293
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component 937
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component 8513
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter) 9
Average Geodesic Distance 3.140191
Graph Density 0.00522786

20110121-NodeXL-Twitter-stateoftheunion top between users list

The most “between” contributors in the network are:

@keitholbermann, @borowitzreport, @thefix, @katyinindy,
@america1first, @wbconservative, @westwingreport, @dailykos,
@writer2go, and @gottalaff

When contributors with low “betweenness” are filtered out of the graph, two dominant clusters become easier to discern.  To the left are supporters of the President and to the right are those critical of the Administration.  A representative tweet from this cluster is highlighted.

20110121-NodeXL-Twitter-stateoftheunion high between users

This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. Yes, this is a sample of a few hours of traffic. Total volume on the hashtag is much higher, but this snapshot captures much of the social network structure in the hashtag.

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