Twitter Art Network - the Big Players

Twitter as an information service has developed rapidly since 2009. Most institutions have by now adopted a twitter account to distribute news and stay in touch with an audience.
Especially in the art world museums and galleries started using the social networking platform, creating important nodes in the twitter univers.

Some art institutions managed to attract a large fellowship with the @Tate for example having about 216,308 followers or the @MoMa with 388,670 followers.


Graph by single-blogs / Major art museums have adopted twitter as a networking and news channel tool. This art institutions twitter social network is constructed from @ tweets and RT tweets as a directed network graph.
Data collected using 140kit and visualised using gephi.

Of course now of interest is how these nodes link in to the wider twitter network and also how they link to each other. There are of course a number of different interests colliding and this reflects the stiff competition to some extend.

From the most recent 2000 twitter messages by each institution a social network graph was generated to visualise how some of the top museums are connected through activity in tweet terms. The graph represents how the institutions interact with other users and how this connects them into an entangled social network.


Graph by single-blogs / Zoom in on details around the New Yorker museums MoMa, New Museum, Guggenheim and the SFMoMa,

The nodes represent twitter users and the edges, connection lines, are established through @ tweets, a public direct message at some other user(s). The second indicator for established connection are the RT, the retweeting of messages by others.

Interesting to see is how the institutions have rather few direct links, but share quite a bit of intermediate twitter users. Especially between the american institutions there are quite some established connections, but also links across the atlantic are establish. Explore the graph in details below using the Google Maps style navigation.

Art Institutions Social Network

Graph by single-blogs using the GMap Image Cutter / Art Institutions Social Network - Use the Google Maps style zoom function in the top left corner to zoom into the map and explore it in detail. Click HERE for a full screen view.

You can check out the institutions involved on twitter for detailed info on the tweets.
@ZKM, @newmuseum, @tate, @MoMa, @sfmoma, @MOCAlosangeles, @vanabbemuseum, @ModernaMuseet, @mori_art_museum, @centrepompidou, @metmuseum, @guggenheim, @maspmuseu, @V_and_A, @NationalGallery, @npglondon, @_TheWhitechapel