Making sense of the world – one tweet at a time.
Hannes Hesse
Kesava Mallela
Christopher Volz
Information Visualization – Fall 07
Prof. Maneesh Agrawala
KEYWORD
EXPLORATION
Twitter recently introduced a track functionality, that lets users track
messages by keywords. Since twitter integrates with IM, the volume
of tracked messages can be quite large.
Twitter Message Explorer helps users deal with this flood of
information. Users can enter their track words and the application will
plot a interactive bar chart as shown.
When a user clicks on a bar, a tag cloud of the most commonly
occurring words is shown on bottom left. Clicking on one of the tags,
refreshes bottom right with the messages that contain that track word
and the tag.
This method of exploration can thus greatly reduce the time taken by
user to make sense of vast amount of information.
GEOGRAPHIC
EXPLORATION
We implemented an interactive tool for region based
browsing of Twitter messages. A zoomable and draggable
map displays translucent red dots that represent individual
messages. Upon zooming and moving the map, new
messages are loaded within the focus of the central area of
the map. This allows users to explore the concentrations of
Twitter messages over the world.
In addition, a summary of the selected messages in the form
of a word cloud is displayed alongside the map. The cloud is
constructed by computing term frequency after some preprocessing and stop-word removal