Computer program collects, analyzes and visualizes Tweets from the Democratic Debate held on October 14, 2015

NodeXL, a computer program that maps, measures and attempts to understand the landscape of social media, recently created a graph representing live tweets during the Democratic Debate held on October 14, 2015. The graph represents a network of 13,903 Twitter users whose tweets contained the hashtag, "#DemDebate", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets. This graph visualizes a maximum of 18,000 tweets that were obtained from Twitter on October 14, 2014 over a 16-minute period.

Source: Social Media Research Foundation

I chose this image because it is relevant to news and politics today. I thought it was interesting to see the way in which thousands of people shared their ideas live about Clinton, Sanders and others via the Internet. This visualization is important because images like this one enable people to understand just how important social media websites, like Twitter, are in the spreading of ideas and opinions about current events in the U.S. and all over the world.

However, before beginning to write my blog I had to do a substantial amount of research about the NodeXL program and how to interpret the visuals. When I first started browsing though the visualizations I was very confused and overwhelmed by the images. I found it hard to interpret exactly what all the lines and edges meant, how they were connected, and what they represented. However, I find it so interesting that a computer program can obtain so much data and organize it in a way that allows people to interpret it. The page also lists top URLs, top domains, and top hashtags in Tweets in different sections of the visualization. This enabled me to understand how these visualizations can be used to follow social media trends.

After exploring the Social Media Research Foundation's visualizations, I would like to know more about how much time it takes to compile and organize all this data, and what exactly these images are used for. How do they further our knowledge and understanding about social media besides spotting certain trends?