Conference ICL2009 September 23 -25, 2009 Villach, Austria

Tracking the dynamics of social communities – Visualising

altering word clouds of Twitter groups

Wolfgang Reinhardt1
1
University of Paderborn, Institute of Computer Science

Key words: microblogging, technology enhanced learning, informal learning,

visualisation, dynamic social networks, dynamic topic networks

Abstract:
Twitter has gained a lot of attention in the last three years. It is used in various use
cases from discussing at conferences, taking personal notes or live coverage of
prominent events. Communities in Twitter are forming through the usage of a common
tag that is part of the message. This paper presents an application for monitoring and
visualising the dynamics in such communities, especially dynamics in the written
communication of the community and presents approaches to make this application
part of a mashup of services in a Personal Learning Environment.

1 Introduction
Nowadays learning takes place more and more within the World Wide Web. Technologies,
concepts and applications commonly known as Web 2.0 allow broad user interaction, user
generated content, and mobile learning. Never before learning has been more mobile,
pervading and informal than today [5]. Communities of Practice [15] as well as Communities
of Interest [16] are using the Web for communication, coordination and monitoring of their
activities. The recent popularity of Social Network Sites (SNSs) like Facebook1, mySpace2, or
studiVZ3 has lead to massive networking of users and organisations. SNSs provide untold
possibilities for user interaction and have been promoted as central to the Web 2.0. Usual
functionalities of SNSs include: a user profile page, a list of friends, private messaging,
groups, media uploading and commenting [7]. With blogs, microblogs, image community
platforms (e.g. Flickr4), or social bookmarking sites (e.g. Delicious5) object-centered sociality
[2] became a mass phenomena. Users not only connect to each other, they connect through
shared objects [7].
Social networks are representing social structures made of nodes that are tied by some
type of interdependency. Social networks emerge whenever people are communicating with
each other, working together, exchanging data, entering friend- or relationships and in many
more cases. Social network analysis (SNA) has emerged as a key technique in modern
sociology. SNA uses different metrics in order to make claims about the social structure of the
network, central nodes or the closeness of nodes. If the nodes in such a network do not
represent people but artefacts (like pictures, blog entries or videos) we talk about artefact

1
http://www.facebook.com/ (last viewed on 2009-08-19)
2
http://www.myspace.com (last viewed on 2009-08-19)
3
http://www.studivz.net/ (last viewed on 2009-08-19)
4
http://www.flickr.com/ (last viewed on 2009-08-19)
5
http://delicious.com/ (last viewed on 2009-08-19)
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networks, wherein the same metrics can be applied. Assuming we could connect social
networks with artefacts networks, preserving the context and semantic relations between users
and artefacts, we could obtain Artefact-Actor-Networks (AANs) [3]. AANs provide
comprising information about the linking between users and artefacts and thus supply deeper
understanding of how communities use artefacts for object-centered sociality. Furthermore it
is from research interest to analyse the dynamics of both social and artefact networks, in order
to understand how communities emerge, evolve and break up.
In this paper the following research question is addressed: “How can we track and
visualise the dynamics of written communication within a community?” The main focus is the
centre of attention of the investigated community. We developed an application to persist and
analyse communication from the microblogging service Twitter6 and present a prototypical
visualisation of the dynamics in communities.

2 Microblogging and PLEs

In this section we introduce the concept of microblogging and show use cases for its
application in various domains. Besides this, informal learning in PLEs and mashups are
discussed.

2.1 Microblogging
Templeton [8] characterizes microblogging as “a small-scale form of blogging, generally
made up of short, succinct messages, used by both consumers and businesses to share news,
post status updates and carry on conversations” and Owyang [9] describes the difference
between blogs and microblogs as follows: “[...] long form blog posts like this seem so much
slower and plodding compared to how quickly information can come and go in Twitter. [...]
Information within Microblogging communities [...] encourage rapid word of mouth – of both
positive and negative content”. In a nutshell, microblogging offers a platform for the fast
exchange of thoughts, ideas and artefacts.
Twitter is the most commonly used service for microblogging and gained a lot of
attention in the last three years (e.g. during the inauguration of President Obama). With
Twitter the user is allowed to send messages with a maximum of 140 characters. These
messages, so-called tweets, can be public or private, can be directed to one or more Twitter
users (identified by the @ sign) and can deal with certain topics (identified by the # sign). By
using a hashtag in tweets it is easy to aggregate all tweets dealing with the same topic (e.g. a
conference, brand, course or political party). Java et al. [6] discern four main types for using
microblogging services: I) Daily Chatter, II) Conversations, III) Sharing information and IV)
Reporting news. Templeton [8] uses three categories to itemise the possible usage types of
microblogging: a) Microsharing, b) Micromessaging and c) Micrologging. There are manifold
reasons why and use-cases for a service “we didn’t know we needed until we had it” [11], that
is supposed to be “time-suck” [12] and addictive.

2.2 Microblogging in the context of PLE mashups

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) denote systems that help learners to control and
manage their learning in an individual way. Typically the supported learning processes are
rather informal and unstructured. Informal learning is characterized as a process that does not
follow a specified curriculum but rather happens by accident, sporadically and naturally
during daily interactions and shared relationships. Or as Holford et al. [19] put it: Informal
learning is defined as “Learning resulting from daily life activities related to work, family or
leisure. It is not structured (in terms of learning objectives, learning time or learning support)

6
http://twitter.com/ (last viewed on 2009-08-19)
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and typically does not lead to certification. Informal learning may be intentional but in most
cases it is non-intentional (or “incidental”/ random)”. Experience shows that the majority of
real learning is informal [18]. In the focus of PLEs is the learner that selects, arranges,
presents, analyses and shares web resources, learning objects and tools in a way that fits his
personal learning style [1,21]. The personal part of PLEs can be the selection of specific
content (news feeds, blogs, scientific papers as well as pictures or chats) or the design or
composition of the learning environment.
PLEs are a rather technical than didactical approach to learning and the different
approaches to PLEs distinguishes themselves mostly in the way of the respective
implementation. On the one hand it is possible to extend existing Learning Management
Systems (LMS) so that users can create their individual space and cooperate with other users
(e.g. through shared calendars or private chats). On the other hand PLEs can serve as
individual portals that integrate external services via widgets or portlets. Microblogging and
especially Twitter or its open-source counterpart Laconica7 can be easily integrated to PLEs
grace of their open API. Twitter provides widgets than can be easily integrated in PLEs like
iGoogle8 or Elgg9 and thus support communicating, networking and sharing. Other relevant
parts of the individual’s learning process, especially the reflection of communication
processes and the analysis of the content are rarely supported by existing approaches.

3 Design of the Application

The following application was designed to support the reflection of group communication and
to outline the main topics of communication in a group. In its current version the application
is a stand-alone application that accesses data from Twitter and analyses the content with an
external analysis application. In this section we discuss the analysis application and present a
prototypical visualisation of dynamics of the communication as well as other statistical data
generated from the Twitter messages sent.

3.1 The analysis application

The main task for the analysis application is to inspect the communication on Twitter from a
Community of Interest (expressed by the common usage of a hashtag). As result it should be
possible to track the changes within the community structure (size, number of messages, other
tags used) as well as the visualisation of attention points within the tweets. To do this,
snapshots of the community and its messages should be taken regularly and undergo an
analysis. With the help of these analyses the dynamics of personnel and topic networks should
be perceived and visualised. Thus the requirements are amongst others:
• Take snapshots of the development of the community on a regularly basis.
• Analyse the contents of the tweets and gain statistical data.
• Aggregate the textual contents of all daily tweets and extract important terms.
• Prepare data for the visualization of the dynamics in the resulting word clouds.
• Prepare data for the visualization of the members of a community.
• Prepare data for the visualization of other topics the community is interested in.

7
http://laconi.ca (last viewed on 2009-08-19)
8
http://www.google.de/ig (last viewed on 2009-08-19)
9
http://elgg.org/ (last viewed on 2009-08-19)
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3.2 Prototypical Tool for Visualisation

The first prototype for visualising the dynamics of Twitter communities is built using the
Adobe Flex Framework10. It uses the application programming interface (API) of the analysis
application and is visually divided into two areas: the visualisation of user-related data and the
visualisation of community-related data. Each of these areas is divided in three subareas: I)
Recent tweets, II) Statistics and III) Graphs. In this paper we will focus on the analyses and
visualisations for communities. Exemplary we choose the community that used the hashtag
#edumedia09 and wish formed before, during and after the EduMedia 2009 conference in
Salzburg, Austria from 04. – 05.05.2009.
Subarea I shows the recent tweets for the selected tag. The user can select how many
of the recent tweets he would like to see. Subarea II holds multiple tabs. Currently the
following statistical data are evaluated: number of tweets, tweets containing an URL,
conversational tweets (containing the mention of an user) and the number of users who used
the tag. By use of the slider under the statistical data one can go back in time to see the data
from the past.

Figure 1: Users that used the tag #edumedia09 Figure 2: Dynamic word cloud from
#edumedia09 (showing the contents
from 2009-05-05)
The second tab in subarea II shows the users, which used the specific tag (cf. figure 1). User
names in bold font indicate that the analysis application monitors these Twitter users. The
user list is sorted with respect to the number of tweets the users sent using the monitored
hashtag. From this view it becomes obvious that the users mebner, Networking_Lady and
e_trude were the most frequent users of the tag edumedia09. The third tab of subarea II
visualises the most important terms from the tweets sent. Therefore we are using a simple
word cloud that shows the more important words larger than the less important. By use of the
slider under the extracted terms one can go back in time to see the data from the past. With the
play button it is possible to automatically browse through the daily summaries of the tweets
sent. Figure 2 shows the dynamic word cloud extracted from the tweets containing the hashtag
edumedia09 from 2009-05-05.
Another requirement for the visualisation was to provide an easy view on the dynamics of
the personnel network of the community. As we were facing problems in getting data and
visualising large networks, we decided to visualise the respective shares in communication for
each user of the community. We used a stacked area chart for visualisation, where each
member of the community has its own colour for the whole time period. The x-axis is
separated in weeks and the y-axis shows the relative share of messages for the user. As shown
in figure 3, at the beginning of the shown period only a few users (namely wollepb and

10
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/ (last viewed on 2009-08-19)
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mebner) were using the hashtag edumedia09. After the start of the conference on 2009-05-04
the user mebner still had a reasonable part in the communication, whereas the user wollepb
nearly stopped using the tag. On the other hand another user (Networking_Lady) started to use
the tag very frequently and accounted for a relevant part of the communication even after the
end of the conference.

Figure 3: Stacked area chart for visualisation of users using

a specific tag (here: #edumedia09)

4 Conclusion and Outlook

This paper provided an example of how the dynamics of communication within a community
of interest can be tracked and visualised. We presented an analysis application for
communication on Twitter that helps understanding how the centres of attention in group
communication change over time. Furthermore the prototypical visualization helps to realise
the main statistical data about monitored users and communities. The presented toolkit solicits
for the subsequently inspection of communication within a Community of Interest, because
the word clouds and statistical data are updated only once a day. The live coverage of an
event with the help of the presented toolkit does not seem to be useful.
Regarding future developments, some approaches seem to be very promising: grace to
the API of the analysis application we will work on further visualisation and applications that
integrate the results of the analysis in other technical environments such as wikis, blogs or
PLEs. Therefore we will open the API to other developers and develop widgets to be included
in PLE platforms like iGoogle or Elgg. With the integration of other web services for
keyword extraction and semantic analysis, we will expand the mashup basis in the analysis
application. With the implementation of another term extraction tool, that is capable doing
semantically analysis of texts, we will try to extract named entities and moods from the single
tweets and establish Artefact-Actor-Networks [3] from the communication. The connection to
social network sites like Facebook or the integration into cooperative software development
platforms [20] will allow to incorporate the visualisation of written communication in Twitter
in other environments. This will make the communication processes more transparent and
comprehensible.

References:

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Author:
Wolfgang Reinhardt, Dipl.-Inform.
University of Paderborn, Institute of Computer Science
Fürstenallee 11, 33102 Paderborn, Germany
wolle@upb.de

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