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Circadian Patterns in Twitter

Authors:
Marijn ten Thij
Sandjai Bhulai
Peter Kampstra

Keywords: Data analytics; Twitter; Retweet graph; Language use; Daily pattern

Abstract:
In this paper, we study activity on the microblogging platform Twitter. We analyse two separate aspects of activity on Twitter. First, we analyse the daily and weekly number of posts, through which we find clear circadian (daily) patterns emerging in the use of Twitter for multiple languages. We see that both the number of tweets and the daily and weekly activity patterns differ between languages. Second, we analyse the progression of individual tweets through retweets in the Twittersphere. We find that the size of these progressions follow a power-law distribution. Furthermore, we build an algorithm to analyse the actual structure of the progressions and use this algorithm on a limited set of tweets. We find that retweet trees show a star-like structure.

Pages: 12 to 17

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: August 24, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4464

ISBN: 978-1-61208-358-2

Location: Rome, Italy

Dates: from August 24, 2014 to August 28, 2013