As we prepped for our Science Communication Conference 2013 session on how we evaluate I’m a Scientist, the occasional sidetrack leads to interesting stuff.

A while back we used Tony Hirst‘s scripts and know how to download our twitter followers network. We’ve used Gephi to map out the clusters within our network which helps us work out who is following us and how diverse our network is. We were delighted to see an Australia cluster thanks to our friends in Adelaide. More about that later.

Another useful benefit of downloading your followers is the ability to search their bios to find specific followers who are interested in certain subjects. This evening we identified 83 followers with “food” in their bio. We’ll be contacting some of them (excluding those who are just “foodies”) to tell them about our new debate kit on Food Security.

Whilst I was there I thought I’d create a little wordle with big word in it!

100 word Wordle of Bio of followers of @imascientist

To create this wordle I exported the Gephi table into Excel and converted the bios into lowercase and change sciences into science. More cleaning of similar words would create a better wordle but time is always short. Then I pasted the words into Wordle, set a maximum of 100 words, and removed some of the irrelevant words such as twitter and tweet and like. Set some Custom Colors and tweak the layout until it worked and you can see the result. Enjoy.