Exploring social networks – Twitter's mentions and retweets dataset
Twitter is one social network that is explored the most by researchers. The sort of data that is available on Twitter makes it a lucrative source for social network analysis. In this recipe, we are going to consider a small dataset of Twitter's mentions and retweet and explore it in Gephi.
Getting ready
Download Twitter's mentions and retweet dataset from the URL http://rankinfo.pkqs.net/twittercrawl.dot.gz. Unzip the dataset to start exploring it. You may want to make sure that you use a powerful system to build this visualization. This dataset is a pretty large dataset and requires a considerable amount of memory. Insufficient memory may lead to the system crashing.
How to do it…
To analyze the Twitter mentions and retweets data that you just downloaded, follow these steps:
- Start Gephi.
- From the File menu, click on Open and navigate to the folder where you extracted the Twitter dataset. Open the...
