Figure 5. Maximum nestedness marks ephemeral topics at faster time-scales.

Unfiltered, topic-independent Twitter traffic offers similar evidence as the main example (Fig. 2), provided that a suitable time-scale is examined. In particular, nestedness and modularity show strongly anti-correlated behavior (r = −0.7126), with z_λ peaking when a collective attention gathers around an outstanding topic (the most notable one in this plot being the Superbowl event, between February 3 and 4, 2013).