Twitter Mentions

November 12, 2019

John (JP) Coene

Twitter is great source of "network data", plus thanks to Michael Kearney's rtweet package the data is extremely easy to access.

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The idea is to pull tweets on a specific topic (given a boolean search) and graph the network of Twitter @mentions to visualise hubs of conversations, e.g.: @I tweet @you creates a link between "I" and "you."

We use graphTweets to build the latter. First we pull 15,000 tweets that use the #rstats hashtag.

tweets <- rtweet::search_tweets("#rstats", n = 15000L)

We then use graphTweets to create the network of mentions.

library(graphTweets)

net <- tweets %>% 
  gt_edges(screen_name, mentions_screen_name) %>% 
  gt_nodes() %>% 
  gt_collect()

Finally the graph, we tweak the default offline layout so that it spreads out more.

library(grapher)

# rename
names(net) <- c("links", "nodes")

graph(net) %>% 
  graph_offline_layout(
    steps = 100, 
    gravity = -10
  ) %>% 
  scale_node_size(n, c(10, 50)) %>% 
  hide_long_links(180) %>% 
  scale_link_color_coords()