the artist and his
Non Sequitur TwitterBot
Patrick J. O'Donnel
NEU 2015
"When you're plugged in all day, Twitter is fun. Whatever happens in the world, other people on Twitter are talking about it [and only] if you're following along, each successive layer of jokes and elucidations make sense. Twitter can add blue lines to connect
conversations and inline images to spice up the timeline, but it's the very things that make Twitter fun for the core user that make it daunting for the casually interested." The following visualizaiton helps to answer a question regarding the world of
Twitter Bots, and what parts of Twitter-usage are they mimicking? This non-sequitur Twitter Bot, named after the drowsy and mumbling door mouse from Alice's Adventure in Wonderland, pulls from my personal Twitter and frankensteins what it perceives as similar tweets--sometimes pithy, often mad.
Twitter is weird and awful and great, as so are we.
Word Frequency Analysis
If this Twitter Bot is supposed to be a non-sensical version of me, does it use the same words in the same frequencies? A recent collection of tweets from each account was parsed to give individual words, these are the top 30 most frequently tweeted words by account.
It seems as though the ratios of frequencies of basic words between these two accounts show syntax and vocabulary similarities. Further anaylsis into parts of speech and syntactical preferences need to be explored to further showcase differences between accounts.
Length Analysis
Two ways to look at individual tweets, character length is indicative of the Twitter art-form. Tweets are limited to 140 characters, and like an artist exploring the boundaries of the composition, my personal Twitter has a much larger range of Tweet length.
Timeline Analysis
The Twitter bot is not sentient, and therefore needs to be told when to Tweet. Using a Twitter app that is linked to a Tweet Scheduler, the bot tweets approximately once every 1.5 hour by random chance. A user, like myself, will show much more vairance of when they post.
