The Social Network

A major theme of this project is that networks exist everywhere, in both the physical and social worlds. While physical networks are more readily visible, social networks influence the information we receive and operate simultaneously at different strata in peoples’ personal, professional, and communal lives. Social network analysis makes heretofore-invisible relationship networks more readily apparent, and Twitter provides a bounded structure which facilitates an analysis of the communication pathways about important topics like the Common Core. In this act we introduce our dataset, examine the giant #commoncore network formed on Twitter, identify three structural communities that emerge from of the network, and introduce two types of influential twitter actors, transmitters and transceivers.