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The broad adoption of online social networking platforms has made it possible to study communication networks at an unprecedented scale. With social media and micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter, we can observe high-volume data streams of online discourse. However, it is a challenge to collect, manage, analyze, visualize, and deliver large amounts of data, even by experts in the computational sciences. In this paper, we describe our recent extensions to Truthy, a social media observatory that collects and analyzes discourse on Twitter dating from August 2010. We introduce several interactive visualizations and analytical tools with the goal of enabling researchers to study online social networks with mixed methods at multiple scales. We present design considerations and a prototype for integrating social media observatories as important components of a web observatory framework.

The broad adoption of online social networking platforms has made it possible to study communication networks at an unprecedented scale. Digital trace data can be compiled into large data sets of online discourse. However, it is a challenge to collect, store, filter, and analyze large amounts of data, even by experts in the computational sciences. Here we describe our recent extensions to Truthy, a system that collects Twitter data to analyze discourse in near real-time. We introduce several interactive visualizations and analytical tools with the goal of enabling citizens, journalists, and researchers to understand and study online social networks at multiple scales., ACM Computer Supported Cooperative Work '13, Demonstration