Twista — An Application for the Analysis and Visualization of Tailored Tweet Collections

Social media services like Twitter churn out user-generated content in vast
amounts. The massive availability of this kind of data demands new forms of
analysis and visualization, to make it accessible and interpretable. In this article,
we introduce Twista, an application that can be used to create tailored
tweet collections according to specific filter criteria, such as the occurrence
of certain keywords or hashtags. Once the tweet collection has been created,
Twista calculates basic statistics, e.g. the average tweet length or the most
active user. Furthermore, the application can perform basic sentiment analysis,
analyze tweets with regard to their date of publication, and analyze the
communication between different Twitter users. The results of these analyses
are visualized by means of the data driven documents toolkit (d3.js) and can
be viewed directly in the browser, or are available for download in PDF and
JSON format. We also present three exemplary use cases that illustrate the
possible use of Twista for different scenarios.