Regional properties of global communication as reflected in aggregated Twitter data

Twitter is a popular public conversation platform with world-wide audience and diverse forms of connections between users. In this paper we introduce the concept of aggregated regional Twitter networks in order to characterize communication between geopolitical regions. We present the study of a follower and a mention graph created from an extensive data set collected during the second half of the year of 2012. With a k-shell decomposition the global core-periphery structure is revealed and by means of a modified Regional-SIR model we also consider basic information spreading properties.