On March 25 the European Union celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. We followed the official hashtag of the celebrations #EU60, collecting all related Twitter conversations. From March 13 to April 5, the hashtag was tweeted 248,963 times, with a peak on March 25, when 144,108 tweets were sent worldwide, and #EU60 became a trending topic on Twitter.
In the box above, we present an interactive visualization based on hashtag co-occurrence in Twitter discussions containing #EU60. Hashtags are powerful tools for channelling a conversation around a topic. By looking at co-hashtags – that is, the frequency with which two hashtags are used together in the same tweet – we can shed light on thematic associations and investigate the interactional patterns between different communities.
The network above represents all the hashtags that have been used at least 50 times in tweets containing the official hashtag #EU60. The size of each node (hashtag) is determined by how many times the hashtag itself has been tweeted: the bigger the node, the higher the frequency. If two hashtags are used in the same tweet, they are connected by a line (“edge”). The “strength” of each edge is, on the other hand, determined by the number of times the two connected hashtags have been mentioned in the same tweet.
Frequencies, languages, countries
Of all tweets from European countries 19.2% were sent from the UK, followed by Belgium (16.1%), France (12.8%), Spain (11.5%), Italy (7.3%), Germany (7.1%) and the Netherlands (6.8%). English is confirmed as well as the lingua franca in Twitter discussions on EU-related topics, with 50.2% of the collected #EU60 tweets being in English, followed by Italian (16%).
Photo Credits CC lcrf
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