Following recent discussions about the importance of blogging/tweeting to contemporary academia (see: LSE via TaxProf), and Bridget Crawford’s Law Prof Twitter Census (version 3.0) over at TheFacultyLounge, I thought I’d do some number crunching and network building.
I wrote a short script to read all of the law prof twitter handles included in the census and query the twitter API to get the follower lists and statistics for each user. This allowed me to both rank law prof twitterers (because we all know how much people like to rank things) and project them onto an interactive network so we can see how they relate to one another.
To view the network, click through the image below. The law prof network (consisting of following relationships amongst law profs in the census) has 535 nodes and 16354 edges (directed density = 0.057). The entire network (including all of the followers of all of the law profs) is much larger. In total there are 741,385 unique twitter users who follow law profs. You’ll note that almost half of these follow Professor Lessig, who has an order of magnitude more followers than any other law prof.
Colors in the network correspond to communities detected using the Louvain method. Modularity in the network is 0.273, with 5 decently-sized communities and a few solo nodes/pairs. I haven’t delved much into the meaning of the clusters, but I’d be interested to hear any theories about what they might represent.
As with most social networks there’s a skewed distribution of followers. The below plots the degree distribution for the law prof only network (probability of k degree x degree).
There’s a similar skew in the all follower relationships. The table below lists the top twenty profs by number of followers:
| Handle | Name | School | Followers |
| lessig | Lawrence Lessig | Harvard | 324336 |
| SportsLawGuy | Gabe Feldman | Tulane | 33728 |
| zittrain | Jonathan Zittrain | Harvard | 30787 |
| McCannSportsLaw | Michael McCann | New Hampshire | 29771 |
| ZephyrTeachout | Zephyr Teachout | Fordham | 25328 |
| CassSunstein | Cass Sunstein | Harvard | 21333 |
| gregorymcneal | Greg McNeal | Pepperdine | 17440 |
| scrawford | Susan Crawford | Cardozo | 15641 |
| superwuster | Tim Wu | Columbia | 11804 |
| JonathanTurley | Jonathan Turley | George Washington | 11715 |
| bethnoveck | Beth Simone Noveck | NYLS | 10422 |
| patentlyo | Dennis Crouch | Missouri | 9889 |
| PrivacyLaw | Michael Scott | Southwestern | 9024 |
| garylfrancione | Gary Francione | Rutgers-Newark | 8844 |
| adamwinkler | Adam Winkler | UCLA | 8706 |
| ericgoldman | Eric Goldman | Santa Clara | 8350 |
| rickhasen | Rick Hasen | Irvine | 7857 |
| ProfHolloway | Kara Holloway | Duke | 7848 |
| rcalo | Ryan Calo | Univ. Washington | 7738 |
| marycheh | Mary Cheh | George Washington | 7596 |
Limiting our rankings to those professors who have the most followers amongst other law professors on twitter, changes the results quite a bit:
| Handle | Name | School | prof_followers |
| DeanDBRodriguez | Daniel B. Rodriguez | Northwestern | 193 |
| lessig | Lawrence Lessig | Harvard | 187 |
| nancyleong | Nancy Leong | Denver | 167 |
| orinkerr | Orin Kerr | George Washington | 166 |
| CassSunstein | Cass Sunstein | Harvard | 149 |
| profbcrawford | Bridget Crawford | Pace | 143 |
| zittrain | Jonathan Zittrain | Harvard | 140 |
| steve_vladeck | Steve Vladeck | American | 136 |
| CharlotteGarden | Charlotte Garden | Seattle | 136 |
| FrankPasquale | Frank Pasquale | Maryland | 133 |
| lsolum | Larry Solum | Georgetown | 133 |
| DanielSolove | Dan Solove | George Washington | 130 |
| daniellecitron | Danielle Citron | Maryland | 130 |
| SoCalTaxProf | Paul Caron | Pepperdine | 127 |
| profabartow | Ann Bartow | Pace | 120 |
| JoshMBlackman | Joshua Blackman | South Texas | 117 |
| marklemley | Mark Lemley | Stanford | 116 |
| MargotKaminski | Margot Kaminski | Ohio State | 110 |
| OrlyLobel | Orly Lobel | San Diego | 109 |
| ericgoldman | Eric Goldman | Santa Clara | 105 |
If we group profs by school and rank them by followers, the top twenty look as below. Obviously having a twitter superstar on the faculty really boosts the ranking.
| School | Followers |
| Harvard | 383145 |
| George Washington | 40905 |
| Tulane | 33880 |
| New Hampshire | 30421 |
| Fordham | 29133 |
| Pepperdine | 23539 |
| NYU | 18245 |
| Univ College Dublin Sutherland | 16093 |
| Cardozo | 16000 |
| Georgetown | 15823 |
| Duke | 13111 |
| Chicago | 12716 |
| Maryland | 12235 |
| Columbia | 11804 |
| NYLS | 11591 |
| Santa Clara | 11159 |
| UCLA | 11111 |
| Missouri | 9889 |
| Stanford | 9779 |
Again, if we do the same as above but focus only on prof followers the results change quite a bit:
| School | Prof Followers |
| NYU | 730 |
| George Washington | 640 |
| Harvard | 626 |
| Pace | 412 |
| Georgetown | 411 |
| Chicago | 411 |
| Maryland | 366 |
| Univ College Dublin Sutherland | 319 |
| Stanford | 310 |
| Pepperdine | 281 |
| Denver | 256 |
| Duke | 249 |
| Santa Clara | 236 |
| Ohio State | 235 |
| Northwestern | 227 |
| Drexel | 221 |
| Colorado | 211 |
| SUNY Buffalo | 210 |
| Toledo | 203 |
| Boston University | 179 |
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