Visualizing Communication on Social Media: Making Big Data Accessible

TL;DR

This paper presents extensions to the Truthy system that enhance visualization and analysis of large-scale social media data, aiming to make online discourse more accessible for social science research.

Contribution

The paper introduces new analytical tools and visualization techniques for social media data within the Truthy system, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration.

Findings

Enhanced visualization capabilities for Twitter discourse

Facilitated interdisciplinary analysis of online social networks

Supported real-world social science research applications

Abstract

The broad adoption of the web as a communication medium has made it possible to study social behavior at a new scale. With social media networks such as Twitter, we can collect large data sets of online discourse. Social science researchers and journalists, however, may not have tools available to make sense of large amounts of data or of the structure of large social networks. In this paper, we describe our recent extensions to Truthy, a system for collecting and analyzing political discourse on Twitter. We introduce several new analytical perspectives on online discourse with the goal of facilitating collaboration between individuals in the computational and social sciences. The design decisions described in this article are motivated by real-world use cases developed in collaboration with colleagues at the Indiana University School of Journalism.