Because I've recently been... let's just come out and say obsessed with looking at the social relationships that seem to emerge from examining sociograms of Twitter users within the "channel" of a particular hashtag, here's another one I thought was interesting: Media in Transition 6, a.k.a. #mit6.

I was inspired to try this one by looking at Alex Halavais's post Tweeting MiT6 and john maxwell's collection of the #mit6 tweets. With a nice frequency graph, word cloud, and other representations, I thought my graph stuff would be a nice adjunct to the great work these folks have already done.

If you haven't read my recent posts on #swineflu, #09ntc, and #mw2009, take a gander at those--I explain most of the terms I'm using here to the best of my admittedly limited ability. I've mostly been interested in hubs and authorities, the two ranked lists of nodes that come out of Jon Kleinberg's HITS algorithm. As I understand it, hubs work a lot like respected reporters and authorities work like respected sources (in journalistic terms, not in graph-theory terms). So, the highest-ranking authority within #mit6 would be someone who is replied to a lot by the highest number of respected reporters and the highest-ranking hub would be a tweeter who has replied to a lot of respected authorities. Interesting stuff.

So, on with it. Kathleen Fitzpatrick was the highest ranked authority. Looking through her tweets, she seems to have been diligently liveblogging the event, which would explain why many people would be replying and retweeting her tweets--her work became an "authoritative" source for #mit6 information. The next highest ranked authority is Rick Prelinger of Prelinger Archive fame. He was a speaker on the second day of the conference and a prolific tweeter--no surprises here. (Also,he's a personal hero of mine--I love the work he's done saving and archiving ephemera.)

As for hubs, julie levin russo is the highest ranked. She consistently uses the "@" in many of her posts, and, in particular, replies and retweets many of the people on the authorities list. So, top hub. Derek Kompare is the next ranked, and his tweets follow a similar pattern. He's also the third ranked authority, j_l_r is the eighth. Top authority kfitz is also the #6 hub.

There's a nice and contained subgraph of the largest strongly connected component, which is more or less a group of nodes that all link to each other. Take a peek:

Largest SCC for #MiT6: The subgraph of the largest strongly connected component for Media in Transition 6.

All of the "major players" are here--one of the nice things about the SCC and the hubs and authorities is that I've seen that they tend to show the same tweeters. This isn't universally true, though. In #swineflu, the biggest authority, CDC Emergency, didn't appear--because CDC Emergency never replied back to anyone. At #mit6, it seems like a lot of people did a good amount of linking back to each other.

One note of weirdness: I got a total of 1025, a bit more than the 1009 the other folks reported. Not sure why that is--might need to take a look at my search API scraper.

And now, the raw(er) data:

Betweenness centrality

matlockmatlock 0.017
geoffreylong 0.019
j_l_r 0.020
d_kompare 0.024
halavais 0.026
footage 0.028
jmaxsfu 0.033
jeanburgess 0.034
liesell 0.041
eaj6 0.042

Closeness centrality in largest SCC

amorelane 0.345
footage 0.349
d_kompare 0.367
j_l_r 0.408
liesell 0.414
laura47 0.420
jmaxsfu 0.433
shelila 0.439
matlockmatlock 0.453
eaj6 0.460

Indegree centrality

j_l_r 0.032
jmaxsfu 0.032
jeanburgess 0.051
halavais 0.058
liesell 0.058
niemanlab 0.058
d_kompare 0.058
kfitz 0.064
joshgreen 0.083
footage 0.090

Outdegree centrality

jmaxsfu 0.038
aswinp 0.038
shelila 0.038
jeanburgess 0.045
laura47 0.051
matlockmatlock 0.051
eaj6 0.058
j_l_r 0.058
geoffreylong 0.058
d_kompare 0.058

Pagerank

eaj6 0.022
niemanlab 0.023
jcmeloni 0.026
kfitz 0.026
farman 0.027
brlamb 0.029
joshgreen 0.030
critinternet 0.030
jeanburgess 0.037
footage 0.043

Hubs

jeanburgess 0.03
alicejrobison 0.03
eaj6 0.04
matlockmatlock 0.04
kfitz 0.04
loganpoppy 0.07
jmaxsfu 0.07
liesell 0.08
d_kompare 0.11
j_l_r 0.16

Authorities

jeanburgess 0.03
eaj6 0.03
j_l_r 0.04
stoton 0.05
dkompare 0.06
joshgreen 0.08
halavais 0.08
d_kompare 0.09
footage 0.12
kfitz 0.16

Metadata

Total

1025

RT

66

HT

0

OH

0