twarc-network

twarc-network builds a reply, quote and retweet network from a file of tweets that you've collected using twarc. It will write out the network as a gexf, dot, json or html file. It uses networkx for the graph model, pydot for dot output, and d3 for the html presentation.

If you know CSS you can hack at the generated HTML file to modify the style to suit your needs. If you come up with a more pleasing representation please send a pull request! Exporting as a gexf, gml or dot file will allow you to import the data into tools like Gephi, Cytoscape and GraphViz for further analysis and visualization.

Install

To install you will need to:

pip3 install twarc-network

Collect Data

First you will need to collect some data with twarc:

twarc2 search blacklivesmatter > tweets.jsonl

Output Formats

Once you've got some data you can create the default D3 HTML visualization:

twarc2 network tweets.jsonl network.html

or dot:

twarc2 tweets.jsonl --format dot network.dot

or gexf:

twarc2 network tweets.jsonl --format gexf network.gexf

or gml:

twarc2 network tweets.jsonl --format gml network.gml

or json:

twarc2 network tweets.jsonl --format json network.json

or CSV edge list:

twarc2 network tweets.jsonl --format csv network.csv

Changing the Nodes

If you would rather have the network oriented around nodes that are tweets instead of users:

twarc2 network tweets.jsonl --nodes tweets network.html

If you would rather have the network oriented around nodes that are hashtags:

twarc2 network tweets.jsonl --nodes hashtags > network.html

Subgraph Sizes

Depending on the data you are analyzing it can be helpful to remove subgraphs in the graph that are smaller than some number. For example if you don't want to visualize networks where two nodes are only connected to each other and not anyone else you can:

twarc2 network tweets.jsonl tweets.html --min-subgraph-size 3

It's less common but you can also remove nodes that are part of too large subgraphs. For example if you wanted to remove any clusters of nodes that were larger than 10:

twarc2 network tweets.jsonl tweets.html --maxsubgraph-size 10