Visualization of twitter conversations over time

Abstract

Information visualization is a field of visual data analysis that works with abstract information. It also integrates interactions that facilitate users to assimilate the displayed information and understand it quickly. This work focuses on developing a visualization tool that follows all the fundamentals and theories involved in developing visualization for analyzing Twitter data. It analyzes an aspect often neglected in the literature despite its importance, specifically with the visualization tool Twitter conversations that have great importance and repercussions in social and political aspects are analyzed and explored. To obtain Twitter conversations, the official Twitter API is used. This basic information is treated to obtain a file with nodes and links that is very generic. Then the visualization tool is developed that receives the file of nodes and links and allows visualization of Twitter conversations. It also allows users to see how the conversations evolve. The development is validated, and finally, the visualization tool is tested on different datasets where interesting discoveries can lead to research related to bots on Twitter. Thanks to the visualization tool, the findings are adapted to a series of problems and datasets. Therefore the developed tool gives way to its use in other applications, allowing the discovery and analysis of network structures.