Course title LIS 4930

Date 4-29-15
Student name John Thompson
Assignment Final Report
Government Shutdown report: Who talks to what websites in the
Government Shutdown dataset.
My question is who talks to a website during the government shutdown. The
data set consisted of all twitter users who talked to a website (@website.com)
and any users who identified with a political party during the shutdown (keyword
rep and dem). This is important because many people use the internet and
twitter to complain about nothing. All they do is say stuff like GRR
DEMOCRATS SUCK REPUBLICANS RULE and dont contribute what so ever
to the debate. Thankfully though some people (the user nodes I kept in my
dataset) tried talking to a known news website trying to see whats going on or to
give their opinion about what is going on with the shutdown. When I went
through the data I discovered that a little under half of the twitter users just used
the keywords rep and dem but not mention any news website. I used this to
base my judgement on deleting these users because they mostly consisted of
the users just saying its the democrats fault or the republicans fault. After
reading the data I learned that most tweets were to your typical fox news or
Washington post/times.

Investigating Who is talking to a website in the

Government Shutdown dataset.
I am asking who talks to a website using twitter in regards to the government
shutdown. I think this is important because it tells who is trying to actually
discuss the issue instead of just complaining about it over the internet. The data
set contains anyone who has talking to a website about the shutdown and
anyone who referenced their political leanings with rep or dem during the
shutdown.
Data processing
This data set came with people (username) who talked to a website
(@website.com) and people who expressed their political beliefs (keyword rep
and dem) during the events of the government shutdown. Because half the set
was just that persons political leaning (rep or dem) I deleted those nodes
because they were not related to my questions and consisted of about half the

data in the original dataset thus cluttering my graphic with unneeded nodes.
Visualization process
This graph allows one to see which news website was the most popular to talk to
during the government shutdown. All the website nodes were made the biggest
and red so that you can see them better. All the people (usernames) that
tweeted to multiple websites are made blue and smaller than the website nodes
but larger than the 1 tweet nodes so that they stand out more. The layout I used
was force atlas 2 with the overlap and linlog functions enabled to help spread out
the username nodes and prevent them from overlapping so they stand out more,
though this did increase the size of my graph to accommodate all the space
needed for websites with large one user tweets.
Describe the purpose of social network visualizations like the ones we have been
creating all semester. Describe what tool(s) you are using; its upsides and
downsides. Then, after you have created the visualization that you want to
present as your final work product, describe the graph and the metric(s) you used
to create the visualization:

Average Degree.
I used this metric because I wanted to see just how many people talked to
only one website. With an average degree of 1.11 it shows that the user
response majority is only to one website (91%).

Results
RED= website
BLUE=5+ website twitter posters
ORANGE= 3-4 website twitter posters
GREEN= 2 website twitter posts
LIGHT GREY= single website twitter posters