Analyzing Social Network of Celebrities

Aim

To analyze the social network of celebrities and to reveal the inherent structure of the network among them.

Summary

Twitter data was collected for the period of 8 days and network analysis was performed on that. Several interesting observations and findings were gathered by monitoring the social network and performing the network analysis at a detailed level.

My Role (What did I do, learn)

It was a great learning experience as this was my first project in the field of information visualization and data representation. Network analysis for the period of 8 days helped me derive meaningful insights from the graphs which would not have been clear from raw data. I used GEPHI for visualization, SQLite for database and Python for collecting and exporting files which could be feeded into GEPHI.

Design and Methodology

A high level process of how I accomplished this network analysis is presented below:
1. Create a private account on twitter
2. Follow Kevin Bacon, your own twitter account and 50+ celebrities (Appendix A contains list of the 63 celebrities followed)
3. Create Database to store the twitter data using Python and sqlite
4. Create a file for GEPHI
5. Create a neat version of the graph by assigning labels, identifying communities and highlighting well-connected celebrities, etc.
6. Perform network analysis