ASA meeting Twitter network graph

The American Sociological Association meetings, which ended earlier this week, had a rollicking good Twitter stream. Now Marc Smith has analyzed the tweeters who used the hashtag #asa14 (and related), and their interactions, to produce network graphs of the meeting’s tweeted undercurrent. I looked through one of the graphs, which I’ll describe briefly.

Smith used NodeXL, and generated a whole gallery of graphs. Just looking in your browser is difficult because the resolution is too low to identify people, but you can download the giant Excel files he made, or use the interactive graphs which allow you to hover over points and see their handles. That’s how I figured out the following graph, which represents 18,000 tweets from Sunday and Monday, the middle of the conference (click to enlarge, but it won’t help that much). Details here, my description below.

The top left, G1, is the heaviest traffic. This was a lot of leftists in active discussions of Ferguson, Missouri, Mike Brown, and Alice Goffman (and her book On The Run). At the center of that mass seems to be Jessie Daniels from CUNY (who describes herself, fittingly, as an instigator), UT-Austin sociology, Conditionally Accepted, Dr. Compton, and C.J. Pascoe, among others. I can’t find the dot for Tressie McMillan Cottom (Tressiemcphd) — who has the highest betweenness centrality of any individual on the graph, and was the most frequently replied-to tweeter — but it’s probably in G1 somewhere.

Moving clockwise, the next cluster (G3) is centered around the official feed of the ASA, @ASAnews, with a lot of tweets about the conference theme, publishers and their booths, and journals.

Clockwise to G5, you get another cluster with a lot of Mike Brown and Ferguson, but this one more focused on education and academia, including Lean In. At the center of G5 is Sara Goldrick-Rab.

The top right, G6, is where I ended up. It has several lose center points, including me (familyunequal), Tina Fetner, and two people who tweeted ASA content that got picked up by a lot of non-sociologists: Mark Abraham (urbandata) and Str8Grandmother. Also up there is Karl Bakeman (my editor at Norton), the Norton sociology feed, and Contexts magazine.

Next on the far right is G10, which has a lot of critical race discussion (#troublewithwhitewomen), as well as information technology. I can’t tell the theme of G9, which includes Lisa Wade and Nathan Palmer (sociologysource).

The orange oval in G7 is centered around the Émile Durkheim feed (“Invented Sociology, and don’t let any Germans tell you otherwise”). This was probably his most popular tweet this time out, with going on 100 retweets:

In fact, the graph data shows that the G7 sector basically comprises the community formed around this tweet.

The bottom center sector, G4, clusters around Think Progress. Note the strong ties to the top left, where the Ferguson traffic was heaviest. G4 is a key group for transmitting leftist politics into and out of ASA. The feminist Leta Hong Fincher is the node that connects this group to that fan of people off the bottom right of the cluster.

Finally, the bottom left group, G2, is centered on education and technology, with clusters around Liz Meyer, Marc Smith, Gina Neff, and others I’m not familiar with.

So

There are lots of social layers and clusters across the ASA, which could be grouped by specialty, department, age, race/ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, and so on. The Twitter network just happens to leave an easy data trail. I mention all these individuals not to play into a star system, but because it’s easier to name someone than to attempt to categorize them. I’m open to other interpretations of this graph.

I’m getting very sappy in my old age about my love for sociology and sociologists. But as I look over these figures, I think that if I had to pick 5,000 people to spend a weekend with, who all had only one thing in common, I think ASA members was a good choice.