Authors:
Samantha Finn
;
Eni Mustafaraj
and
Panagiotis T. Metaxas
Affiliation:
Wellesley College, United States
Keyword(s):
Social Media Analytics, Social Networks, Twitter, Big Data, Social and Legal Issues, Human Computation.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Collective Intelligence
;
Social and Legal Issues
;
Social Media Analytics
;
Social Networks and Organizational Culture
;
Society, e-Business and e-Government
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel network, the co-retweeted network, that is constructed as the undirected
weighted graph that connects highly visible accounts who have been retweeted by members of the audience
during some real-time event. Like bibliographics co-citation used to indicate that two papers treat a related
subject matter, co-retweeting is used to indicate that two accounts present similar opinions in an online discussion.
Thus, the co-retweeted network can be seen as a form of consulting the opinion of the crowd that
is following the discussion about the similarity (or difference) of positions expressed by the highly visible
accounts. When applied on political conversations related to some event, the co-retweeted network enables
the measurement of the polarity of political orientation of major players (including news organizations) based
on the views of the audience. It can also measure the degree of polarization of the event itself.