As part of my research and data collection I am scraping tweets too and from MPs, Candidates, Parties and certain hashtags associated with the 2014 General Election. So I thought today I would pull all the tweets sent to the #NZQT hashtag between 2pm and the end of question time. Today that totaled 348 Tweets, including an estimates 161 retweets. The top tweeters were:
There are two factors to look at here, One is the number of times they tweeted and the other is the number of times they are mentioned. As you can see, Jordan McCluskey was the most active person tweeting to that hashtag, but he wasn’t mentioned very often on it. Where as No Right Turn didn’t tweet as much, but was mentioned, and retweeted a lot more. This is even more so the case for Russel Norman, who only tweeted 4 times, but was tweeted at 34 times. What also jumps out here is that there are only a few MPs on there, and non of them are National. Now this isn’t to say that they aren’t tweeting, but they are not using the #NZQT hashtag. This means that in general they are only tweeting to people who already follow them, so they won’t be gaining followers, or increasing their engagement. Hashtags are a great way to see and interact with new people.
Now lets have a look at this in a more visual format. I built this using Gephi, and the data preparation was done using this Python Script by Deen Freelon. I used the Fruchterman Reigngold layout method to produce the below graphic. (click on the graphic to see full size).
I will try and do this semi regularly, and I will learn more about how to get the best out of the visualisation software. But I am keen to hear what people think about what it shows.
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