Making Sense of Microposts at Scientific Conferences

Abstract

Twitter is being widely used at scientific conferences. Fol- lowing the microblogging stream, however, adds to the cog- nitive load of a conference participant. Therefore, there is a need for means of extracting the most important topics from a Twitter stream. This demo paper presents an adaptable system for detecting trends based on Twitter, and shows how it can be used within the setting of a conference. Fol- lowing the cues of visual analytics, we use visualizations to show both the temporal evolution of topics, and the relations between different topics.