Track: Data Analytics

Abstract

This study aims to investigate how the Twittersphere reacted during the recent historical event of robotic landing on a comet. The news is about Philae, a robotic lander from the European Space Agency (ESA), which successfully made the first-ever rendezvous and touchdown of its kind on a comet nucleus on November 12, 2014. In order to understand how Twitter is practically used in spreading messages on historical events, we conducted an analysis of one-week of tweet feeds that contain the #CometLanding hashtag. We studied the trends of tweets, the diffusion of the information and the characteristics of the social network created. The results indicated that the use of Twitter as a platform enables online communities to engage and spread the historic event through social media network (e.g. tweets, retweets, mentions and replies). In addition, it was found that comprehensible and understandable hashtags could influence users to follow the same tweet stream compared to other laborious hashtags that were difficult to understand on social media.