Category: Philoso Twitter

DN Twitter, 4/n

9/17/2019

Some stuff just for funsies...

In case you're wondering, there's no correlation between tweet length and favorites:

Also, the average length of DN tweets have gotten longer in the last 4 years, with a decided uptick in April 2018. I thought that this might have been the result of Twitter increasing the cap on tweet length from 140 to 280 but that happened in November 2017. (Apologies for the crammed x-axis labels. Click on the figure to zoom in.)

What about number of likes versus number of retweets?

Ok that's weird. What if we zoom in on those values that are fewer than 500?

So that initial weirdness indicates something kinda neat: if a tweet garners loads of "likes", it's not going to be retweeted. If it gets tons of retweets, it's not going to get many "likes." But maybe there's something to the year in which the tweet was produced?

Nope nothing there either. So, weirdly, DN tweets, are either heavily liked or heavily retweeted but not both.

DN Twitter 3/n

9/10/2019

Another quick post. Here's a plot of the top 10 partnerings by year. (Recall that R returns all values in cases of ties... hence why there are 13 accounts listed in the 2016 graph. Oh and if anyone knows how to order the x-axis in ggplot2 while employing facets, I would be eternally grateful for pointers. I tried everything I could think of and Google and nothing worked.)

Some interesting things to see here. First, DN is partners in 2019 more frequently with philosophers of sex and gender (@Docstockk, @christapeterso, @rachelvmckinnon) -- or at least folks vocal in the debate online -- than in previous years. Second, among the top 10, with the exception of @sciam and @michaelshermer in 2018, there's no clear preference for one over another. I.e. within the top 10 accounts with whom DN partners, there's no one that is head and shoulders parterned with more than another. Third, no account is in the top 10 from year to year. The DN account doesn't consistently partner with one account over multiple years.

One last plot: let's look at all partnerings for DN over the same stretch of time. Names of accounts are not included because they're unreadable. But it's still pretty neat to see the shape of each plot:

Broken out by year, there's not the kind of long tail that we saw in the 1st post (except in 2018). But what is clear is that the DN account, over the last 4 years, engages with more accounts (2016 had 89 partners, 2017 had 162, 2018 had 221, and 2019 has 189 -- though keep in mind that the 2016 counts only go back to March because of query limits on Twitter's API). But there's still a subset of accounts each year that get partnered with more frequently than others, even though the most-partnered accounts change from year to year.

So there you are. We've looked at the folks the DN account responds to or mentions most over the last 4-ish years.

DN Twitter 2/n

9/9/2019

This is going to be pretty short. I was curious if there was any correlation between the proportion of partnerings for accounts in the DN top 25 (see previous post) and the number of followers that they have. My hunch was that more followers mean more popular and thus more likely to get mentioned or tweeted at by the DN account. Again, a rich-get-richer kind of a thing. Here's the full top 25 (which actually comes to 32, since R includes multiple values in cases of ties).

It's a bit tough to read but you can see in the top left corner @sciam with loads of followers and lots of the proportion of partnerings and everyone else clustered on the left. Let's get rid of @sciam to see if that clears things up.

Ok the labels obscure things a bit. Once more without them.

Aaaaaaand one more adding a regression line...

The message is clear: there's little-to-no correlation between the ratio of partnerings and number of followers. My hunch was off the mark.

Soaked feet, bone-dry cuffs

DN Twitter, 4/n

DN Twitter 3/n

DN Twitter 2/n

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