Visualizing the connections among twitter users who tweet “oil spill” with NodeXL

The oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is a topic of great concern to many people in twitter.

This is the map of connections among people who tweeted the term “oil spill”.  There are lots of isolated authors, people who tweeted “oil spill” but are not connected to anyone else who said the same phrase.  The “giant component” is relatively sparse, there is no dense core of “oil spill” people yet.  This is in contrast with many topics where a large, highly interconnected cluster of people defines the “center” of the discussion.  This term remains highly diffuse.

This is the map of connections among people who tweeted the term “BP”.

The BP map also has a large population of isolates, people who are not part of  a “BP” related conversation but have said the term. A small core of highly interconnected users is forming in the “BP” hashtag space but in contrast to a term like “solar”, there is still little cohesion and density in its core.

This is the map of connections among people who tweeted the term “solar”.

This is a topic with a more dense core of highly interconnected Twitter users who share the use of the string “solar” in their tweets.  Ranks of isolates are also present in this topic space but the giant component is more internall connected and cohesive.