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NavigTweet: A Visual Tool for Influence-Based Twitter Browsing

  • Conference paper
New Horizons in Design Science: Broadening the Research Agenda (DESRIST 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9073))

Abstract

Directed links in social media could represent anything from intimate friendships to common interests. Such directed links determine the flow of information and hence indicate a user’s influence on others—a concept that plays a vital role in sociology and viral marketing. Identifying influencers is an important step towards understanding how information spreads within a network. Social networks follow a power-law degree distribution of nodes, with a few hub nodes and a long tail of peripheral nodes. This paper proposes a novel visual framework to analyze, explore and interact with Twitter ‘Who Follows Who’ relationships, by browsing the friends’ network to identify the key influencers based upon the actual influence of the content they share. We have developed NavigTweet, a novel visualization tool for the influence-based exploration of Twitter network. The core concept of the proposed approach is to identify influencers by browsing through a user’s friends’ network. Then, a power-law based modified force-directed method is applied to clearly display the graph in a multi-layered and multi-clustered way. To gather some insight into the user experience with the pilot release of NavigTweet, we have conducted a qualitative pilot user study. We report on the study and its results, with initial pilot release.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics, Information and Bio-Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, 20133, Milano, Italy

    Chiara Francalanci & Ajaz Hussain

Authors
  1. Chiara Francalanci
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  2. Ajaz Hussain
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chiara Francalanci .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Maynooth University, Maynooth, Ireland

    Brian Donnellan

  2. Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

    Markus Helfert

  3. Intel Labs Europe, Leixlip, Ireland

    Jim Kenneally

  4. Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA

    Debra VanderMeer

  5. University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

    Marcus Rothenberger

  6. Universität St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Robert Winter

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Francalanci, C., Hussain, A. (2015). NavigTweet: A Visual Tool for Influence-Based Twitter Browsing. In: Donnellan, B., Helfert, M., Kenneally, J., VanderMeer, D., Rothenberger, M., Winter, R. (eds) New Horizons in Design Science: Broadening the Research Agenda. DESRIST 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9073. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18714-3_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18714-3_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-18713-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-18714-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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