Day one of IIW IX from Twitter
Top ten authors for the day:
8 ciberch (Monica Keller) 8 fulling (Steve Fulling) 8 jtrentadams (J Trent Adams) 8 judico (judi) 8 ragavan (ragavan) 15 windley (Phil Windley) 16 ryazwinski (Rick Yazwinski) 17 mwhelm (mwhelm) 22 anilsaldhana (Anil Saldhana) 68 DrErnie (Ernest Prabhakar)
Iterating over this retrieval command,
curl http://search.twitter.com/search.atom\?q=iiw+OR+iiw9\&rpp=100\&page=1 >\ TweetsIIW9_Tues01.xml
i collected the recent #IIW (and #IIW09) tweets, as i did at the end of JCDL2009, using the same lame gawk script to clean up the raw output.
I was disappointed to find that the Twitter list API has no way to get the whole stream for the IIW9 twitter list. It seems the best i could do would be to get the most recent status of every listed account. This is rather disappointing, because the chatter on the list is relevant and interesting but does not consistently use the #iiw tag. (I’d blame Tied House libations, but #dataownership is being used….)
I’m further disappointed to find Many Eyes is not letting me log in, so i can not generate visualizations there. However, there is always excel, so one new analysis is looking at the number of mentions of a twitter handle in proportion to how many tweets they made. So, while @DrErnie tweeted a great deal about IIW, he had a ratio of 0.19 because there were only thirteen mentions of @DrErnie (including 6 replies and 1 retweet). @dataportability tweeted four times and had four retweets, so a ratio of 1, and @windley ended up with a ratio of 0.33 with five mentions. One of @dataportability’s tweets was “RT @jtrentadams: Coming out party of DataPortablity EULA/TOS work at IIW by @EliasBiz and @greenbes #iiw via @danielabarbosa”
I wish i had a good tool at hand to show the strengths of these interconnections. Excel is not it — at least, i don’t know how to make pivot tables give up this sort of network analysis. (But somebody else is addressing this analysis with Excel: http://www.codeplex.com/NodeXL/)
Other data analysis disappointments after the cut.
- Mallet: jar didn’t run. Cosole loggs errors like “2009Nov03 9:40:38 PM [0x0-0x29a29a].com.apple.JarLauncher[7336] SystemFlippers: didn’t consume all data for long ID 0 (pBase = 0×100135320, p = 0×100135324, pEnd = 0×100135328)”
- Agna sounds great but is on a lost geocities site. 8(. Wait — here’s a copy! Sheesh, getting the matrix built to use the visualization would be a scripting challenge in itself.
- SocNetV looks useful, especially if one could use its crawler instead of curl. Sadly, “Warning: To compile or install SocNetV, you need Qt 4.4 and QtWebKit development files. See Instructions” I’m not up to getting Fink set up right on this machine (i’m sure it broke when i migrated from my previous machine.)
- “Contact us for more information on purchasing InFlow and training on how to do social & organizational network analysis.” Um, no.
- http://www.codeplex.com/NodeXL/ “Do you need to display and analyze a network graph but you don’t want to deal with difficult applications, arcane file formats, or advanced programming languages? NodeXL may be what you’re looking for.” Yes! But, oh, look, what’s this setup.exe doing in my life. Windows version of Excel. And there was a workshop on this tool in town last week. Double disappointment.
