I let The Archivist (a Twitter data mining application from the Mix Online experiements) loose on the term Iran and it has run for the last five days. At this point, I now have an archive of around ~200,000 tweets about Iran. So, then, the question becomes,  what to do with all that data? After all, data is only interesting if you can do something with it.

Tim came up with an idea: what if we created a tree map that showed who the top 100 people were who tweeted the most about this topic. That way, you could quickly get a sense of who the people were most active on this topic. So with some guidance from Hans (who built a tree map control for the Descry project) and an assist on my LINQ query* from Joshua, I quickly put together the following infographic (click on it to see a larger version):

So, of the 200,000 tweets about Iran, the person in the upper left has tweeted most about Iran and then the data distributes itself from there.  From here, you can imagine a lot of possibilities – different pivots on the data, drilling down, etc.

We just put this together this morning – not sure where it is going but am curious to hear if people find this interesting. Let us know and be sure to follow us on Twitter for the latest updates from MIX Online.

*Here’s the LINQ query by the way – the crux being the sub select that pulls the avatar out of the grouping:

            
var items = (from tweet in tweets
            group tweet by tweet.Username into grp
            orderby grp.Count() descending
            select new TreeMapItem
            {
                Size = grp.Count(),
                Label = grp.Key,
                PanelItemType = typeof(CustomTreeMapItem),
                Tag = (from subtweet in grp 
			select subtweet).First().Image
                
            }).Take(100)
            ;