TweetViz began as a conversation about 'untangling the hairball' or unpacking the dense cluster of relations hidden within the Twitter social networking platform. While some of our early attempt to visualize the networks within Twitter were gorgeous, they did not convey any meaningful data about the conversation in those networks. In order to simplify the data our group decided to focus in on visualizing hashtags and their interaction with each other.
The project collected approximately a million tweets using a twitter scrapping program called Twarc. The tweets we chose to collect all include references to a pair of popular politicians: Nelson Mandela and Rob Ford. Unlike the other visualization, the data is not preprocessed in R. Instead, the full text of each tweet and the user who tweeted each tweet was placed in a database, which the server analyses real time before sending it to D3. The benefit of this is that it would in theory allow for an extended prototype to pull directly from Twitter and visualize conversations as they happen. Unfortunately, the downside is that this also increases loading time.
Project Lead: Geoffrey Rockwell
Concept: Lori Regattieri
Design: Jennifer Windsor
Programming: Ryan Chartier