• Graph

How did all this get started?

Well, back in 2015 I was working on the Nepal Earthquake Relief effort. After getting blood to hospitals and water to camps, I decided to take a look at how people were finding out about the earthquake on social media.

Here is a small piece of information that came out of an analysis I was doing of the Tweets from the Nepal Earthquake. The usual work I do with these Tweets is mine them for pleas for water, food, shelter and medicine but after turning this activity over to volunteers, I have been looking at some of the patterns of Tweets to show how some people are becoming aware of the disaster.

I was able to grab about fifteen thousand tweets in a period from May 6th to May 7th with the hash tag #nepalearthquake. I was looking at who would serve as somewhat of a gateway for information about the quake generating a storm of Tweets that would make the issues more widely known in the ‘Twitterverse’. What I found is not necessarily surprising, but I didn’t expect to see this particular Twitter account as a single node in a graph of fifteen thousand.

Using GraphML and Twitter scraping and Node tools I have been getting some interesting information from the Tweets about the Nepal Earthquake. As mentioned, I have been mostly interested in personal needs and the needs at shelters and hospitals in the Kathmandu area. When you pull the Tweets into a graphing package you get what I call a Twitterverse.

Twitterverse for #nepalearthquake

This pattern shows the nodes and edges related to the content of Tweets that we may be interested in. Zooming in you begin to see interesting patterns as well as hubs, spokes and clusters. Your eyes naturally go to large clusters like the one to the left.

Interesting hub in the #nepalearthquake Twitterverse

With a hub like this single node connected to the large cluster you can begin to see that if there is a mover and shaker in this view of the Twitterverse it is this one point. So who could set off a storm of Tweets, the Red Cross, UN, even the Wall Street Journal?

No – think more Boy Band.

The Tweet in question that pretty much leads to the expanding nebulae of messages in the above Twitterverse is from the account of One Direction.

Boyish Band One Direction - Hub of the Twitterverse

Boy Band Point of Interest

Um…Thanks Guys