Big Data and Westminster:

Twitter Analysis of AV Referendum

Steven Gray Research Associate Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL University of Manchester, November 2011

Twitter + Tweet-o-Meter = Big Data

What did we do?

Step 1

Custom Collector ran for 1 month before AV Vote

What did we do?

Step 2

Human coders rated each tweet for sentiment and vote

5 groups of 2 pairs for every tweet, each coder coded ~4,963 tweets

What did we do?

Step 2

Human coders rated each tweet for sentiment and vote

5 groups of 2 pairs for every tweet, each coder coded ~4,963 tweets

What did we do?

Step 3

Geocoded tweet profile location from users profiles

Westminster

51.49, -0.12

behind you ...

Total Geo-codings: 24,293

Could not Geocode

What did we do?

Step 4

Heatmap Visualisation

What did we do?

Step 4

Visualised Data over Time

Results
Sentiment Analysis Breakdown
!"#$%&'()*'+*,-"##.#)/*0#1#23*4#/(##)*5'&#"3*
0)+,-) /)+,-) .)+,-) 1)+,-)

!"#$$%$&'()

*)+,-)

Total Tweets Rated: 19,875

Results
For/Against Analysis Breakdown
!"#$%&'()*+,-#.'/0"1),"2,%&#..3.)+,4.5.6*, ,
+)./0)1)23() -,) +)./0)1)5$") -,)

-)./0)1)5$") 6,) -)./0)1)23() 4,)

!"#$$%$&'() *+,)

Total Tweets Rated: 19,875

bigdatatoolkit.org

Steven Gray http://www.stevenjamesgray.com http://www.bigdatatoolkit.org Twitter: @frogo