Twitter Assignment

In this Assignment, you will characterize a social network on Twitter using the NodeXL Twitter Import feature. To use this feature, you must first sign up for an account at Twitter.com. You are not required to actually use the Twitter service yourself in order to carry out this research; you only have to sign up for an account

OpenNodeXL, be sure that you have the NodeXL tab selected on top, and select Import->From Twitter Search Network...

The first time you use NodeXL Twitter search, a pop-up window should appear. In order to carry out Twitter searches, you must authorize NodeXL to be used by your Twitter account. Select the option in the pop-up window that reads "I have a Twitter account, but I have not yet authorized NodeXL to use my account to import Twitter networks. Take me to Twitter's authorization page." After you authorize NodeXL, you'll be given a verifying number to enter back within the NodeXL program.

Now try your own search. Change the option "Limit to 100 people" to "Limit to 500 people," and be sure to try and make a search that won't return too many Tweets - to save its computer power, Twitter will only let you do so many searches every hour, and the bigger the search you make the more likely that Twitter will put you on hold. Search for "trees" or "Justin Bieber" and you'll get flooded with results. A good search is one that not too many people talk about, but that a few people talk a lot about. Find a network with a fair amount of replies, mentions, retweets etc. Take some time to experiment with different searches until you find a Twitter network interesting to you. Use the visualization options in NodeXL to look at the structure of conversation and decide what's interesting.

Having found an interesting Twitter network, create a meaningful sociogram/graph in which you use node (vertex) design and edge design to depict patterns in who is having Twitter conversations with whom. Include this sociogram in your assignment.

Referring to Chapter 5 of the Hansen text and your work earlier this semester in measuring network characteristics, use the Graph Metrics command in NodeXL to measure as many network characteristics regarding your Twitter network as possible. Be sure to report these network characteristics in your assignment.

Referring to the graph/sociogram and network characteristics where appropriate, discuss your choice of a Twitter search and patterns in the resulting network that you obtained. What of importance do these results indicate?

Right click your graph/sociogram and click on copy image. Then paste the image onto a word processing document. Post your assignment as a word processing document to the appropriate Blackboard section.