Evelina Gabasova
Social networks play an important role in our society. When we look at the community of people who are using F#, Twitter plays an important role. People communicate and make interesting posts on Twitter. In this chapter, I’ll go through a basic exploratory analysis of a part of the F# community that is active on Twitter.
Social network analysis is helpful in analyzing how groups work, the relations within groups, and how information spreads within a community of people. It can also help you identify people who are important or influential within a community.
Throughout this chapter, you’ll download data from Twitter with help from the F# JSON type provider. Then we’ll look at the structure of the network and compute some basic network characteristics. You’ll also visualize the entire network with D3.js and use R provider for other descriptive plots. Finally, you’ll implement the PageRank algorithm, which is a good measure of importance or centrality of nodes in a network. This way, you’ll identify the most important people in the F# community on Twitter, according to their social connections.