  The broad adoption of online social networking platforms has made it possible
to study communication networks at an unprecedented scale. Digital trace data
can be compiled into large data sets of online discourse. However, it is a
challenge to collect, store, filter, and analyze large amounts of data, even by
experts in the computational sciences. Here we describe our recent extensions
to Truthy, a system that collects Twitter data to analyze discourse in near
real-time. We introduce several interactive visualizations and analytical tools
with the goal of enabling citizens, journalists, and researchers to understand
and study online social networks at multiple scales.
