Empirical Memetic Tribes

A course project in Network Science for university (CS degree) , inspired by Peter Limberg and Connor Barnes ' iconic piece The Memetic Tribes Of Culture War 2.0 .

We sampled twitter by using the chieftains from the article as seeds and scanned their friends and their friends' friends.

Plotting the degree distribution from our sampled network, we can observe a truncated power law distribution. Social networks tend to follow power laws, which says something about the way the twitter network emerges. Namely, it suggests that the rate of preferential attachment is sublinear.

Finally, we used community-finding algorithms to identify tribes in our network, and observed their most important members to estimate the character of the tribe. We also measured how different network attributes varied between the subgraphs of each community.

Here is the pdf of the report for the course , I hope I remake it for the web with prettier visualizations one day.