Complex Network Analysis of North American Institutions of Higher Education on Twitter

Abstract

North American institutions of higher education (IHEs): universities, 4- and 2-year colleges, and trade schools—are heavily present and followed on Twitter. An IHE Twitter account, on average, has 20,000 subscribers. Many of them follow more than one IHE, making it possible to construct an IHE network, based on the number of co-followers. In this paper, we explore the structure of a network of 1,435 IHEs on Twitter. We discovered significant correlations between the network attributes: various centralities and clustering coefficients—and IHEs’ attributes, such as enrollment, tuition, and religious/racial/gender affiliations. We uncovered the community structure of the network linked to homophily—such that similar followers follow similar colleges. Additionally, we analyzed the followers’ self-descriptions and identified twelve overlapping topics that can be traced to the followers’ group identities.