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Exploring Knitting Pattern Popularity in Social Media (304971)

*Jennifer Star Vekert, North Carolina State University College of Textiles 
Lori Rothenberg, North Carolina State University College of Textiles 

Keywords: social media, IBM Watson, textiles, data visualization

Hand knitting is a vibrant portion of the textile industry, and of potential interest to academic research, although very little research has been performed. This study uses a popularity algorithm on the knitting based social network Ravelry to explore the variability of knitting popularity and how said popularity may be influenced. Data visualization was achieved with IBM Watson Analytics(TM). The results show that fluidity is high, fingering weight shawls are the most popular type of pattern, and there is no association between the amount of social media chatter about a pattern or how it is tagged on Ravelry and the popularity of this pattern.