Exploring Data Portal India Activities on Twitter

December 8, 2015

Author: Kr Pawan

Today, in the era of bigdata, communication has become easy and widely associated with the masses. Twitter, Facebook & Google+ are spreading their root all around the world and let their users communicate and stay connected with society. In the same way, Data Portal India has stepped forward in connecting the citizen and letting them know about the open government data and data science activities through Twitter and Facebook. On daily basis, on the OGD platform, there is publication of a number of open government datasets & other resources and visualization on its website (www.data.gov.in) and spread the same through social media websites.

Here, I am going to explore the activity of Data Portal India on twitter. Data Portal India is using dataportalindia as twitter handle; twitter handle is a twitter name that is used to respond when tweeting someone and people identify user through it. It has the @ sign in front of it, and if you take the @ sign off you can just type in twitter.com/(Twitter Handle) (https://twitter.com/dataportalindia ) and you’ll be at their twitter page.

Now let’s start the journey of Data Portal India through the twitter. In this process I have used R programming to get inside the twitter by using twitteR package.

First install all the essential packages in R that is required for the analysis. These packages are twitteR and httr.

getUser function returns a user object, which can then be pulled for further information. It helps further to grab information about the user’s followers, who they follow, retweets and more. Here, u object contains user information and after applying getDescription() it gives the description of profile that is updated by user. OGD India has 74123 followers and 44 friends in its account. u$getFriends(n=5) gives the name of 5 friends of OGD India as n=5.

Now take the list of all friends of Data Portal India that includes their Screen Name, Location, Name, Status Count, Followers Count, Favorites Count, Friends Count and url as shown below

screenName	location	name	statusesCount	followersCount	favoritesCount	friendsCount
MEAIndia		Vikas Swarup	11062	504128	8	478
AgriGoI	New Delhi	Agriculture INDIA	468	8771	10	164
KeralaTourism	Kerala, India	Kerala Tourism	18340	49663	535	2028
IndiaCensus2011	India	IndiaCensus2011	206	24918	0	296
TexMinIndia	New Delhi	Ministry of Textiles	650	47543	77	90
opendatacon		opendatacon	1013	2233	1885	1207
dgftindia	India	DGFT	154	4473	0	8
OpenDataZurich	Zürich, Switzerland	Open Data Zurich	8731	3719	7734	3064
FinMinIndia	New Delhi	Ministry of Finance	1466	84711	8	124
mygovindia	New Delhi	MyGovIndia	1047	227700	38	69
GoI_DeitY	New Delhi	DeitY	1397	26480	151	354
RailMinIndia		Ministry of Railways	5696	523338	19	103
adgpi	New Delhi, Delhi	ADG PI – INDIAN ARMY	3318	512804	6	31
MoHFW_INDIA	Nirman Bhawan	Ministry of Health	4397	136663	41	26
HRDMinistry	Shastri Bhawan, New Delhi	Ministry of HRD	934	254232	22	130
RashtrapatiBhvn	New Delhi	President of India	3197	1076287	2	0
HMOIndia	North Block, New Delhi	HMO India	1964	691751	123	25
PTI_News	New Delhi, India	Press Trust of India	31338	634853	0	1
DDNewsLive	New Delhi, India	Doordarshan News	74070	856235	10	12
rsprasad	India	Ravi Shankar Prasad	2005	708435	216	231
DataGovUK		UK Open Public Data	539	4530	64	299
PMOIndia___		PMOIndia	0	48910	0	0
ICSEconf	Austin, TX	ICSE	1924	2810	83	1126
sampitroda		Sam Pitroda	4875	295736	954	177
MIB_India	New Delhi, India	MIB India	23992	423443	170	16
tourismgoi	New Delhi, India	Ministry of Tourism	2482	28603	0	154
PMOIndia	India	PMO India	7699	8598239	1	211
PIB_India	New Delhi	PIB India	68153	668430	363	132
govcampus	International	GovCampus	5594	4616	9	3386
OpenGov	Washington, DC	Open Government	829	817829	0	82
Indiagovin	New Delhi	indiaportal	794	15911	66	32
undata		UNdata	176	16408	5	79
NITIAayog	New Delhi, India	NITI Aayog	1495	689008	51	157
KNOWINDIAPORTAL	India	Know India	1840	4501	0	2
LatestDataGovUk		Data.gov.uk latest	22	683	0	1
indiawater	India	India Water Portal	20124	12752	169	2029
opengovpart		Open Gov Partnership	7761	30401	338	1235
JeanneHolm	Pasadena, CA	Jeanne Holm	2873	4020	555	937
worldbankdata		World Bank Data	6486	30528	77	341
GuardianData	London, UK	Guardian Data	7132	61624	7	204
CKANproject	Everywhere soon	CKAN	1392	6785	73	492
OKFN	Global	Open Knowledge	7736	34738	1293	1519
OGPL	US/India	OGPL	50	502	0	3
usdatagov	Washington, DC	Data.gov	2958	19308	250	127

 

In the friend list, favorite count has its own importance and indicates the number of likes of the profile page. OGD Portal has 7 favorite counts and what they have twitted it is shown below:

Now let’s do the analysis of timeline page of OGD. Timeline page gives the information (tweets) provided by user on its twitter page. It helps its followers updated. OGD India has around 2968 tweets. I have done timeline analysis through that I have grabbed all tweets and have shown 10 below:user$favorite gives the detail of all favorite.

For further analysis, I have taken 400 tweets. Below table has the complete information of the tweets for Demonstration purposes I have used only 5 tweets.

text	favorited	favoriteCount	replyToSN	created	replyToSID	id	replyToUID
Deaths by Factory/Machine Accidents during 2014 https://t.co/bW3u7SWAwD	FALSE	1	NA	12/4/2015 7:09	NA	6.72674E+17	NA
#Visualization: #Traffic handled at #JLN #Port from 2000-01 to 2013-14 https://t.co/UVf3bExtKt  #OpenData #OGDIndia https://t.co/ykaWbd8QvR	FALSE	2	NA	12/3/2015 4:58	NA	6.72279E+17	NA
Accidental deaths by Cooking Gas Cylinder/Stove Burst during 2014 https://t.co/LILYLBqsQh	FALSE	2	NA	12/2/2015 6:45	NA	6.71943E+17	NA
All India #ConsumerPriceIndex – Jan 2015 to Aug 2015 https://t.co/NPUrkK3nee #OpenData #Economy @FinMinIndia #OGDInd https://t.co/HjZB0u8f0J	FALSE	5	NA	12/1/2015 4:33	NA	6.71548E+17	NA
Deaths in Traffic Accidents during 2014 https://t.co/MEdTK570Za	FALSE	3	NA	11/30/2015 6:56	NA	6.71221E+17	NA

 

statusSource	screenName	retweetCount	isRetweet	retweeted	longitude	latitude
<a href=”http://www.facebook.com/twitter” rel=”nofollow”>Facebook</a>	DataPortalIndia	2	FALSE	FALSE	NA	NA
<a href=”http://twitter.com” rel=”nofollow”>Twitter Web Client</a>	DataPortalIndia	1	FALSE	FALSE	NA	NA
<a href=”http://www.facebook.com/twitter” rel=”nofollow”>Facebook</a>	DataPortalIndia	4	FALSE	FALSE	NA	NA
<a href=”http://twitter.com” rel=”nofollow”>Twitter Web Client</a>	DataPortalIndia	9	FALSE	FALSE	NA	NA
<a href=”http://www.facebook.com/twitter” rel=”nofollow”>Facebook</a>	DataPortalIndia	6	FALSE	FALSE	NA	NA

 

 

 

A replyToSN attribute that includes the username of a user dataportalindia was replying to via a particular tweet.

Graph indicates the tweets created and twitted by DataPortalIndia. It doesn’t seem much interesting because of limited information. To make it more interesting it’s better to plot OGD replies to another twitter user, arranging the user names in the order in which they were first publicly replied to:

 

The red dots are replies, and the green dots are tweets that are neither replies nor retweets.

Now lets do some more experiment. In twitter, #tag analysis is also very popular. #tag helps users to understand what users are posting in twitter by keeping particular tags in reference. To visualize what users have posted by keeping dataportalindia as #tag, I have created statistical app using R and Shiny wherein just type particular tag and it grabs all the information and network graph that associates people around that tag in one page.

 

From the above analysis, we have realized that we can track anything if the data associated with that event is available in any format, just it requires right direction. Here, we have explored twitter activity of Data Portal India from that we have grabbed information regarding followers, friends, retweets count, association of group on particular tweets, second by second activity and more.