Twitter Connections Shaping New York City

Mapping who mentions whom on Twitter, to see whether social ties draw the same neighborhoods that movement does.

Sobolevsky S, Kats P, Malinchik S, Hoffman M, Kettler B, Kontokosta C · HICSS 51, 2018 · Read the paper →

A step past the mobility work: instead of where people go, this one looks at who they talk to. We built a spatial network from Twitter @-mentions across New York — treating a mention as a thread of connection between two places — and ran community detection to see whether social ties alone carve the city into neighborhoods.

They do, and the social map lines up closely with the one movement draws, which says people who are connected also tend to move alike. My part was the network construction and clustering; Stan Sobolevsky led the paper.