Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project
►http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/20/mapping-twitter-topic-networks-from-polarized-crowds-to-community-clust
Conversations on Twitter create networks with identifiable contours as people reply to and mention one another in their tweets. These conversational structures differ, depending on the subject and the people driving the conversation. Six structures are regularly observed: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and inward and outward hub and spoke structures. These are created as individuals choose whom to reply to or mention in their Twitter messages and the structures tell a story about the nature of the conversation.
If a topic is political, it is common to see two separate, polarized crowds take shape. They form two distinct discussion groups that mostly do not interact with each other. Frequently these are recognizably liberal or conservative groups. The participants within each separate group commonly mention very different collections of website URLs and use distinct hashtags and words. The split is clearly evident in many highly controversial discussions: people in clusters that we identified as liberal used URLs for mainstream news websites, while groups we identified as conservative used links to conservative news websites and commentary sources. At the center of each group are discussion leaders, the prominent people who are widely replied to or mentioned in the discussion. In polarized discussions, each group links to a different set of influential people or organizations that can be found at the center of each conversation cluster.
▻https://nodexlgraphgallery.org/Images/Image.ashx?graphID=2272&type=f
Part 2: Conversational Archetypes: Six Conversation and Group Network Structures in Twitter | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project
▻http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/20/part-2-conversational-archetypes-six-conversation-and-group-network-structures-in-twitter/#network-type-1-polarized-crowd
Part 2: Conversational Archetypes: Six Conversation and Group Network Structures in Twitter
By Marc A. Smith, Lee Rainie, Ben Shneiderman and Itai Himelboim
After examining thousands of maps of hundreds of subjects and events we found six distinct network structures in Twitter social networks. Each is profiled below. There is no doubt that there can be other styles and structures of social media networks remaining to discover. The landscape of social media remains a partially undiscovered and poorly mapped terrain. The six network types we describe are intended as initial examples of distinct forms, not as an exhaustive list of all possible forms. It is also important to note that these maps only cover Twitter. Similar structures may occur in similar types of social media services, but it might also be the case that different kinds of social media services may generate different structures of networks.