Tweets from the 215th meeting of the AAS

Can we divine anything from the Twitter stream of the 215th meeting of the AAS?

The results presented here unfortunately do not reflect all the tweets from the meeting, but only those available via the Twitter Search API.

Please see Nathan Bergey's "AAS Twitter Stream Graph" for an alternative view of the data.

Whilst the following link doesn't really belong on this page, I don't want to lose it, so here's a link to tweets from .Astronomy3 by Geert Barentsen.

Who won: #aas or #aas215?

For the period January 1, 2010 to January 8, 2010, I found there were 352 tweets that contained the #aas215 hash tag, and 895 that used the #aas hash tag. So, it looks like #AAS is the preferred tag for future meetings. I have not (yet anyway) bothered to look for those tweets that mentioned both.

Here's the word cloud from the 1247 tweets:

Wordle: The 215th American Astronomical Society, as observed by Twitter

If we include all the @names as well, then we find that some Astronomers were talked about as much as the science! More prosaically, they were probably just re-tweeted a lot, as I wouldn't want people to think we are that narcissistic :-)

Wordle: Were Tweeters or science more talked about at AAS

Word Clouds from during the meeting

The following word clouds were generated at various points during the meeting, and mainly concentrate on the #aas215 tweets, which - as we shall see below - was perhaps a mistake. The "cleaning" used to clean up each tweet was also not constant between runs.

  1. The #aas215 tweets up to the Sunday (so before the main meeting had started). Re-tweets, hashtags, and user names were removed from the list before creating the cloud.

    Wordle: Tweets about the AAS 215 meeting (using the #aas215 hashtag) - Sunday

    If you don't clean out the tweets then you end up with a rather different word cloud (PDF).

  2. Tweets during the talk about Kepler on the Monday morning: unsurprisingly planets was a popular term!.

    Wordle: Tweets about the AAS 215 meeting (using the #aas215 hashtag) - Kepler

  3. Tweets up to lunch time on Wednesday (I apparently need to learn how to spell tweet).

    Wordle: More tweets from AAS 215

  4. Tweets up to the conference dinner on Wednesday.

    Wordle: Twitter updates from AAS 215 up to the conference dinner

  5. Just to change it up a bit, here's the #AAS stream as the conference is winding down on the Thursday afternoon. It looks like - but I need to actually crank the handle when I'm not running late for my plane - that #AAS was more popular than #aas215 here. I also thought I'd removed re-tweets but apparently not (unless there happened to be a great astronomical interest in the iterm RT in all the talks ;-).

    Wordle: #AAS tweets from AAS 215 as the meeting winds down

Credits

The tweets used in the work presented here were extracted from Twitter using the Twitter Search API and some hand-rolled Haskell code. Ask me if you want the "raw" data (as it is), or any other information about this work.

The word clouds presented here were generated by Wordle. The images created by the Wordle application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Details:

Creative Commons License
Images created by the Wordle.net web application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Last, but not least, thank you to all the Astronomers who used Twitter to discuss the meeting.

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