Visualizing informal learning behavior from conference participants’ Twitter data with the Ostinato model

Network analysis is a valuable method for investigating and mapping the phenomena that drive the social structure and for sharing the findings with others. This article contributes to an emerging field of ‘smart data’ research on Twitter by presenting a case study of how community managers in Finland used this social media platform to construct an informal learning environment around an annually organized conference. In this empirical study we explore informal learning behavior in the project context, especially by analyzing and visualizing informal learning behavior from Twitter data using the Ostinato Model introduced in this paper. Ostinato is an iterative, user-centric, process-automated model for data-driven visual network analytics.