Extracts from a\u00a0grad school analysis I ran investigating what agencies have been communicating through social media and the resulting response from constituents. <\/em><\/p> By looking at tweets of 8 top active agencies on Twitter, I hoped to identify shared topics that agencies are tweeting about and \u00a0if these topics are a good prediction for retweets \u2013 as a proxy for civic engagement.\u00a0 While any study of social media platforms are subject to critique due to questions of adoption, usage and access, looking at what has been tried and its response among citizens may help agencies proactively navigate in the debate by knowing what topics hold their active constituents attention and what areas require other forms of outreach or engagement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The top eight agencies that represented operational, administrative, emergency and service constituency specific missions were chosen for the analysis. This \u2018stratified sample\u2019 was done in order to get the most diversity in types of tweets issued, while minimizing the volume of data under analysis.<\/p> The most recent 3200 tweets were pulled using Twelt.com. The Twitter API was used to pull back twitter profiles and the number of followers and status counts for the selected agencies, as of the last update date of 12\/12.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The LDA method, a model that treats a topic as a discrete distribution of words with a probability with concentration and base measure, was used to identify groups of words that formed a topic across all tweets.![\"\"](\"http:\/\/lanimcleod.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/LDAResult-1024x757.png\")
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