Miskatonic University Press

Code4Lib North #c4ln tweets

code4lib r

About a month ago I was at Great Lakes THAT Camp 2012 (staying in a former convent) and I made a graph of tweeting action and posted about it at #thatcamp hashtags the Tony Hirst way.

The last couple of days I was at Code4Lib North 2012 (staying in a former convent) and on the train back home I made a graph of tweeting action, this time using ggplot2 in R the way Tony Hirst had. This should let you recreate it:

> require(ggplot2)
> require(twitteR)
> require(plyr)
> tweets <- searchTwitter("#c4ln", n=500)
> tw <- twListToDF(tweets) # turn results into a data frame
> tw1 <- ddply(tw, .var = "screenName", .fun = function(x) {return(subset(x, created %in% min(created),select=c(screenName,created)))})
> tw2 <- arrange(tw1, -desc(created))
> tw$screenName <- factor(tw$screenName, levels = tw2$screenName)
> library(stringr)
> trim <- function (x) sub('@','',x)
> tw$rt=sapply(tw$text,function(tweet) trim(str_match(tweet,"^RT (@[[:alnum:]_]*)")[2]))
> tw$rtt=sapply(tw$rt,function(rt) if (is.na(rt)) 'T' else 'RT')
> png(filename = "20120525-c4ln-tweets.png", height=800, width=600)
> ggplot(tw)+geom_point(aes(x=created,y=screenName,col=rtt))
> dev.off()

(If you don't have the twitteR (or ggplot2 or plyr) package installed then run install.packages("twitteR") (or the other package name) to get it.)

#c4ln tweets

What does this show us? Original tweets and old-style RT retweets, first off. That a few people started using the hash tag early(@ajmcalorum was first off the bat). That a few people used it a lot (the usernames, lower down, with a lot of dots along their horizontal line) and more people used it only once (usually retweets). That there were a number of tweets on 23 May (the day before, when people were travelling to Windsor to get there), but things started in earnest on the first day, 24 May.