title: Quantifying regional differences in the length of Twitter messages.
abstract: The increasing usage of social media for conversations, together with the availability of its data to researchers, provides an opportunity to study human conversations on a large scale. Twitter, which allows its users to post messages of up to a limit of 140 characters, is one such social media. Previous studies of utterances in books, movies and Twitter have shown that most of these utterances, when transcribed, are much shorter than 140 characters. Furthermore, the median length of Twitter messages was found to vary across US states. Here, we investigate whether the length of Twitter messages varies across different regions in the UK. We find that the median message length, depending on grouping, can differ by up to 2 characters.
authors: Department of Mathematics, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors: Christian M
authors: CM
authors: Alis
authors: National Institute of Physics, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines.
authors: May T
authors: MT
authors: Lim
authors: Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom.
authors: Helen Susannah
authors: HS
authors: Moat
authors: Department of Mathematics, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors: Daniele
authors: D
authors: Barchiesi
authors: Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom.
authors: Tobias
authors: T
authors: Preis
authors: Department of Mathematics, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors: Steven R
authors: SR
authors: Bishop
mesh_terms: D003142:Communication; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D061108:Social Media; D006113:United Kingdom