Over the past 3 years I have been studying social networks for health (e.g. public health campaigns, clinical conferences). I have been collaborating with clinicians and analysts across the world in this work, publishing some of the outputs in peer-reviewed journals as listed below, studying the content, influencers, components of tweets that could influence retweeting, commercial influences in conference tweeting, responses beyond the hashtag, and looking at hierarchy of tweeting. Some of these have been published already – e.g. most recently a paper with Muge Cevik and David Ong, available for a few more weeks in free full text. Look out for details of the remaining papers over coming months. One area that I have been keen to explore, but have not been able to until now, is mapping older tweets and retweets. Twitter provides access to tweets and retweets over the past 10 days. Sometimes a network will take longer than 10 days to establish, at which point the data become difficult – or expensive – to extract. This blog explains how to extract older tweets and retweets manually so that they can be mapped well beyond the 10 day limit, using NodeXL. I have used the example of #CwPAMS (Commonwealth Partnerships for Antimicrobial Stewardship) following a request by Diane Ashiru. I have illustrated this using 30 tweets first, and then the retweets that followed. It would be possible with patience and time to map all the #CwPAMS tweets using this method.

Continue reading “One step beyond: Mapping older tweets and retweets” →