EvoRiver: Visual Analysis of Topic Coopetition
on Social Media

(a) Topic coopetition dynamics during the 2012 U.S. presidential election with EvoRiver, showing most of the topics were transiting from competition to cooperation during that time; (b) Playfair-style chart of spending and job to unfold their coopetition power; (c) Pairwise similarity between international issues and other topics with connected arcs; (d) Word cloud of international issues.

Cooperation and competition (jointly called "coopetition") are two modes of interactions among a set of related topics on social media. How do topics cooperate or compete with each other to gain public attention? Which topics tend to cooperate or compete with one another? Who plays the key role in coopetition-related interactions? We answer these intricate questions by proposing a visual analytics system that facilitates the in-depth analysis of topic coopetition on social media. We model the complex interactions among topics as a combination of carry-over, coopetition recruitment, and coopetition distraction effects. This model provides a close functional approximation of the coopetition process by depicting how different groups of influential users (i.e., "topic leaders") affect coopetition. We also design EvoRiver, a time-based visualization, that allows users to explore coopetition-related interactions and to detect dynamically evolving patterns as well as their major causes. We test our model and demonstrate the usefulness of our system based on two Twitter data sets (social topics data and business topics data).

@article {YWu2014b,
author = {Guodao Sun and Yingcai Wu and Shixia Liu and Tai-Quan Peng and Jonathan J. H. Zhu and Ronghua Liang},
title = {{EvoRiver}: Visual Analysis of Topic Coopetition on Social Media},
journal = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proceedings of IEEE VAST 2014},
year = {2014},
volume = {20},
number = {12}
}