{"id":2798,"date":"2017-03-31T16:29:00","date_gmt":"2017-03-31T21:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/amst-data-driven\/?p=2798"},"modified":"2017-03-31T16:29:00","modified_gmt":"2017-03-31T21:29:00","slug":"social-network-analysis-of-isis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/amst-data-driven\/2017\/03\/31\/social-network-analysis-of-isis\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Network Analysis of #ISIS"},"content":{"rendered":"

I chose to use the most recent 3,000 tweets, as the hashtag topic of ISIS has no shortage of use and is not bound to any particular time period. Unfortunately, ISIS is always in the news and consistently being discussed, so there is no need to focus on one particular date or time in looking at the tweets.<\/p>\n

I found that I have 3,589 columns of data. Katherine and I agreed that we believe columns are left blank because people are retweeting a tweet about the topic, but not directing it toward anyone in particular.<\/p>\n

When I opened Gephi, I found that there are 77 nodes (people in the book), and 254 edges (connections between them). I would choose an Undirected graph instead of a Directed graph for Les Miserables<\/em>, because we want to see the mutual relationships between people, even if they aren’t talking directly to each other.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/p>\n

Valjean: ID#11 Nodes, 11 sources, connected to 3 targets<\/p>\n

Fantine: ID#23 Nodes, 19 sources connected to 18 targets<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/p>\n

I chose to use a Repulsion Strength of 7,000, as I felt it most clearly represented my data. It was not so condensed that it overlapped, however it was still close enough to see the connections. I had a Network Diameter of 20, with an Avg. Path Length of 8.581. I believe that this means that my tweets come from a variety of sources, that are not all that closely connected.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/p>\n

After looking at my visualization, I was surprised to find that the biggest contributors were not official governmental accounts, but rather a couple of personal accounts. The biggest contributor was a user by the account name of melisaraimmo. After looking her account up, it seemed she was was an advocate for a Kurdish independent state and for peace in the Middle East. Many of her tweets involve pictures and videos of violence in the Middle East, so it is not surprising that she would frequently use the ISIS hashtag. I was surprised to see, however, how relatively little of a following she had relative to her impact on my visualization. With under 3,000 followers, she still manages to connect with a huge number of people and plays a big role in the #ISIS twitter discussion. A user by the name of abramo_dino was also heavily connected in the conversation, and had shared a similar message to melisaraimmo with similar first hand experience. A third personal account went by the name of petejohn10, who is a self-described Putin supporter, and critical of the Middle East. Melisaraimmo and abramo_dino had a noteworthy amount of connection between them, while petejohn10 was more connected to other personal and less active accounts.<\/p>\n

In addition to these users tweeting heavily about #ISIS, there was also a separate conversation going on, with the accounts of realdonaldtrump, potus, and s_t_o_p_terror heavily intertwined. I was not at all surprised to see these accounts in connection with each other, however I was surprised to see how they were not communicating directly with the accounts of users in the Middle East who were more directly experiencing the issue of ISIS. The isolated nature of these Twitter conversations is very telling to the conversations of the issue in the political sphere, so I thought it was really cool to see these visualized through Twitter data.<\/p>\n

Lastly, there were accounts such as agendaofevil, which was an account whose content was entirely bashing Islam. The account agendaofevil had a significant presence in the visualization, but had many followings isolated to this account alone. There were not many connections between the people interacting with this account and other sources, it appeared they got their news from and conversed about ISIS solely with this account. I thought it was very interesting to see how isolated people were in there discussions of #ISIS, and I believe it speaks to the issues of the topic of ISIS and the Middle East very well. The time period for my tweets did not play much into my visualization, as news and tweets regarding #ISIS are pretty much in a consistently heavy flow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I chose to use the most recent 3,000 tweets, as the hashtag topic of ISIS has no shortage of use and is not bound to any particular time period. Unfortunately, ISIS is always in the news and consistently being discussed, so there is no need to focus on one particular date or time in looking…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1680,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/amst-data-driven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2798"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/amst-data-driven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/amst-data-driven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/amst-data-driven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1680"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/amst-data-driven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2798"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/amst-data-driven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3148,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/amst-data-driven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2798\/revisions\/3148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/amst-data-driven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/amst-data-driven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/amst-data-driven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}