I’ve been playing with Twitter data over the last week, archiving Algerian, Egyptian, Iranian, and Chinese tweets. I thought I’d bring the story a little closer to home this time by archiving tweets from Wisconsin Union protesters on the #wiunion tag. Grab the dataset of 165,593 tweets here, and check out the two figure of 5-minute tweet counts and highest frequency accounts below. The code to generate the figures is also available at this gist.
Update: I’ve updated the sample to the present, so it now includes 206,005 tweets from Feb 16 to the morning of Feb 22. I’ve also updated the figures and added a table of the ten highest frequency tweeters in the text of the post.
Ten Highest Frequency Tweeters
- @jenn976: 1636 tweets
- @WEAC: 974 tweets
- @WarLordwrites: 905 tweets
- @coopmike48: 823 tweets
- @Rocky1542: 818 tweets
- @Khassy2010: 806 tweets
- @all_a_twitt_r: 711 tweets
- @Leoslaire: 667 tweets
- @CAFalk: 660 tweets
- @MotorHomeless: 644 tweets
Cool graphs, but what does this tell us about Wisconsin, or unions, or twitter, or R?
In a deep sense, nothing, especially because I have no desire to get into the insane fervor of the debate.
However, if you are interested in who to follow on Twitter or wondered whether the protests were getting weaker or stronger, these two figures probably give you a pretty good idea.