Community Analysis of Networks of Twitter Keywords

Twitter is a massive social network accessible to anyone who wants to share an idea or read the thoughts of others. The content of posts varies wildly, with even individual users itting between topics from Tweet to Tweet. However, with the aid of network science and community detection we present our hypothesis that the Tweets of any user can be grouped into only a small number of main ideas, or communities. Politicians increasingly use social media, such as Twitter, to commu- nicate information and promote their policy goals. Through the lens of complex network analysis, we were able to parse the words posted by Twit- ter users and create keyword networks of words appearing near each other. Using those networks, we propose the Small Community Hypothesis, which is de▯ned as the tendency of Tweets from any particular user to group them- selves into a small number of thematically related clusters. iii