I have recently been obsessed with TAGS (Twitter Archiving Google Sheet) – a powerful google sheet that uses Google Apps Script to pull data from Twitter’s Streaming API. Not only is it extremely powerful (it can extract 10,000 tweets in seconds, and I gone as high as 30K ), it comes with ready made Summary, Dashboard and Interactive Visualisation.
TAGS does not require any developer or data scientist skills (or even spreadsheet skills) allows people with no coding skills to access the wealth of information that’s stored in Twitter’s API.
I started creating visualisations for Hashtag Games – games I was not even aware that I was playing for the past few days.
Yesterday's hashtag game #FamousMillennialQuotes was classic!! Dashboard build with TAGS: https://t.co/rtzDRd8GsF pic.twitter.com/bBRkqsP4Yz
— Deborah Kay (@debbiediscovers) September 1, 2016
Hashtag Games became Hashtag Wars
One of the hashtag games #HowtoConfuseaMillennial, turned into an intergenerational fight on Twitter.
The #HowToConfuseAMillennial hashtag is getting heated! https://t.co/6WgufUdAWx
— Twitter Moments (@TwitterMoments) September 4, 2016
#HowtoConfuseaMillennial Hashtag Game with Twin Peaks! Only took 8 hours to get the Millennials fighting back! pic.twitter.com/MkOp0cvA0m
— Deborah Kay (@debbiediscovers) September 5, 2016
Click on nodes of Interactive Visualisation of #HowtoConfuseaMillennial https://t.co/mRwszBLBau Find your tweets!! pic.twitter.com/33l0tipTHR
— Deborah Kay (@debbiediscovers) September 5, 2016
Comparing Visualisations across different Twitter Events
I am not a data scientist nor have I studied data visualisation, so take these comments as observations of an untrained eye.
Looking at the visualisations, it’s obvious that very different types of conversations are taking place during different Twitter events. I did a quick comparison of Hashtag Games, a Twitter campaign in India, a sample of tweets from #Bufferchat and #CMWorld.
Using @mhawksey's #powerful TAGS interactive tool, visualise differences across Twitter events #bufferchat #cmworld pic.twitter.com/Fxer9P0eJD
— Deborah Kay (@debbiediscovers) September 10, 2016
In these visualisations, each node represents a Twitter account and the lines are connections between two accounts (e.g. a mention or a retweet). The more connections you have, the larger the node (and the size of your name).Hashtag games are essentially lots of strangers retweeting each other – so all the connecting lines are out-bound. Whereas all the events that involve conversations (replies and mentions versus retweets) show in-bound connections. The stronger the connection, the stronger the core (e.g. #bufferchat and @askaaronlee)
And here are some of the Videos that I made