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Graphing Twitter friends/followers with R (updated yet again)

[This article was first published on Cornelius Puschmann's Blog » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
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Those of you following my occasional updates here know that I have previously posted code for graphing Twitter friend/follower networks using R (post #1. post #2). Kai Heinrich was kind enough to send me some updated code for doing so using a newer version of the extremely useful twitteR package. His very crisp, yet thoroughly documented script is pasted below.

?Download graph_friendsfollowers.R
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# Script for graphing Twitter friends/followers
# by Kai Heinrich (kai.heinrich@mailbox.tu-dresden.de) 
 
# load the required packages
 
library("twitteR")
library("igraph")
 
# HINT: In order for the tkplot() function to work on mac you need to install 
#       the TCL/TK build for X11 
#       (get it here: http://cran.us.r-project.org/bin/macosx/tools/)
#
# Get User Information with twitteR function getUSer(), 
#  instead of using ur name you can do this with any other username as well 
 
start<-getUser("YOUR_USERNAME") 
 
# Get Friends and Follower names with first fetching IDs (getFollowerIDs(),getFriendIDs()) 
and then looking up the names (lookupUsers()) 
 
friends.object<-lookupUsers(start$getFriendIDs())
follower.object<-lookupUsers(start$getFollowerIDs())
 
# Retrieve the names of your friends and followers from the friend
# and follower objects. You can limit the number of friends and followers by adjusting the 
# size of the selected data with [1:n], where n is the number of followers/friends 
# that you want to visualize. If you do not put in the expression the maximum number of 
# friends and/or followers will be visualized.
 
n<-20 
friends <- sapply(friends.object[1:n],name)
followers <- sapply(followers.object[1:n],name)
 
# Create a data frame that relates friends and followers to you for expression in the graph
relations <- merge(data.frame(User='YOUR_NAME', Follower=friends), 
data.frame(User=followers, Follower='YOUR_NAME'), all=T)
 
# Create graph from relations.
g <- graph.data.frame(relations, directed = T)
 
# Assign labels to the graph (=people's names)
V(g)$label <- V(g)$name
 
# Plot the graph using plot() or tkplot(). Remember the HINT at the 
# beginning if you are using MAC OS/X
tkplot(g)

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