The Norwegian Twittersphere

Abstract

Abstract This article takes a new approach to the comprehensive study of an entire national Twitter-sphere. It identifies, to the extent that this is possible with the data made available through Twitter’s Application Programming Interface (API), all accounts operated by Norwegian users and institutions, analyses patterns in their public profile information, and maps their follower/followee connections with each other. This provides new insights into the historical development of the Norwegian Twittersphere, its current network structure and the presence of diverse interests and issues amongst the nearly one million accounts within this community. Its findings also constitute important background information for future Twitter research that takes the familiar hashtag studies route: its observations enable such studies to filter their datasets for confirmed Norwegian accounts only, and to examine the presence of accounts with specific interest profiles, as determined by the present study, in their datasets.