One Wordcloud A Day

Right now #KCHonors is trending. I actually didn't have much idea about what this is so I went to their website and read more. Below is the press release about this event. 2015 Kennedy Center Honors Press Release Accordingly, here is the wordcloud. I didn't realize earlier but @kencen and @cbs were the most commonly used Twitter handles with this hashtag, which is quite obvious. It turns out that the performance by Aretha Franklin was superb and Obama, who attended this event, was also moved. The words "fur" and "coat" appear because she removed her fur coat during the performance. Among the honorees, Cicely Tyson's name appears the most often. I Still Can't Believe My Eyes @fox5dc ! @ArethaFranklin Made POTUS @BarackObama Cry! Loved It! Only Her WOW #KCHonors pic.twitter.com/TtGcfnD0vY — James Padgè (@YourBoiFatz) December 30, 2015 The sentiment is neutral for the most part but there are many positive tweets and only

Maybe you don't know the stand up comedian David Spade. But when you will see his picture, maybe you will remember him. Today was a slow day for me on Twitter because all the trending hashtags looked too boring. So there was this minor controversy around David Spade criticizing Obama, which was trending on Twitter and somewhat interesting for me. " David Spade " by dodge challenger1 - Image:David Spade in car.jpg , cropped. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons . This is what David Spade said about Obama: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/david-spade-obama-thirsty_56800c80e4b014efe0d86e54 Basically, he was criticizing Obama for being too media savvy and doing sort of things that are not presidential Honestly, first I thought that he was trending because he died. I was not the only one though. There were a few more people on Twitter who thought so as well. David Spade trending. Thought he died.💀 — Elle@TeamBlonde (@ElleTeamBlonde) December 28, 201

Yesterday when I started downloading the tweets, #MUFC was trending. MUFC stands for Manchester United Football Club. The news was that they suffered 4th straight loss in the Premier League . Their manager Louis van Gaal or LVG for short took some decisions that were not popular. You can read up more here . The breaking news is that LVG has been asked to resign by the MUFC board. BREAKING: Louis Van Gaal has been asked to resign by Manchester United's board. #mufc — Dan Moore (@DanMooreBBC) December 27, 2015 At this backdrop, here is the wordcloud. No wonder LVG is right in the center as the most frequently used word with this hashtag! Stoke is the team against which MUFC lost. "Mourinho" is for Jose Mourinho who is tipped to be the next boss of MUFC. But after the loss, Twitter fans started tweeting about this prematurely .   The sentiment was overall positive but comparatively it was more negative than what we have been seeing in the past few days.  

Today LeBron James was trending so I used that for the wordcloud. I like basketball but I am not a big fan of LeBron. It turned out that his team Cleveland Cavaliers lost to Golden State Warriors . In the last 4 minutes he tried to turn the game around but it didn't work out. In the wordcloud there are words that confused me. Maybe something about "caught", "trash", "talking"? Steph Curry, who plays for Warriors shows up frequently. So does Kobe although he wasn't playing for either of the teams. But it might be for some other story .   The sentiment was way more positive. This suggests that his fans were tweeting. This sentiment graph also marks a departure from the last few neutral sentiment charts!

This is a very late update but whatever it is worth, I will post it here. As you may recall, Steve Harvey called out the wrong contestant as the winner of Ms Universe. This wordcloud below consists of the tweets after he screwed up. As expected, Steve Harvey is all over the wordcloud. Also, words such as "sorry", "wrong", "omg", "mistake" ," awkward" all appear frequently, reflecting what Twitter was talking about. The sentiment chart is not very informative and mostly neutral.

Earlier today I downloaded around 100K tweets with the trending hashtag #MissUniverse2015. The wordcloud was clean with the winner Ms Philippines, Pia Wurtzbach, showing up the most often in the wordcloud. Then I went home and found out that the host Steve Harvey wrongly announced Ms Colombia as the winner and then corrected himself and announced Ms Philippines! So I started the download for another 200K tweets. That's still under way so meanwhile I thought I will give you the first update. There is nothing interesting here to be honest :)   Nothing much to write about the sentiment either. But let's wait for the second update.  

Today's hashtag is for the Democrats debate. This was a 3-way debate between Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Martin O'Malley in Manchester, New Hampshire. I have no idea who the third guy is. It seems that Twitter didn't care either.   The overall sentiment about the debate was mostly neutral.

The wait has ended. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is released and this twitter hashtag started trending. I was interested in knowing what people are talking about Star Wars given that many on Twitter are perhaps too young to know Star Wars. I think that a lot of words in the wordcloud are very operations: see, seeing, tonight, watch, like, going, looking, etc. But interestingly there are a few worries such as "spoiler" and "hype". The excitement is less apparent though. There are a few words that indicate people are looking at this with more positive sentiment: excited, amazing, and happy.    The sentiment is surprisingly neutral rather than positive as I would expect. This is not good for Star Wars, is it?  

The other wordcloud for today was for another TV show Survivor. Again, as I don't watch TV, I can barely comment on this!   The sentiment was very positive for this show as well. I tried to download 100K tweets but the API returned only around 62K.

Today I am going to post 2 separate wordclouds. This is the first one, which I created 2 days ago but didn't post on this blog. XFactor is the popular TV show in the UK and they had the finale a couple of days back. So, here is the wordcloud. As I don't watch the show, I can't comment much but as always there is something that surprised me a lot and that's One Direction popping up as the most frequent term. Now it's utterly possible that when I downloaded the tweets, "onedirection" was trending more than XFactor. But this goes on to show how a popular hashtag can be associated with a completely unrelated term. One Direction apparently performed at this event. It was nice to see comments such as amazing, emotional, excited, etc. The sentiment was SUPER positive! Maybe this is the highest positive sentiment I have seen recently. Oh btw, I downloaded 200K tweets this time instead of my usual 100K

Today's hashtag was #SalmanVerdict, which is trending in Asia. Salman Khan is a famous Bollywood actor, who is more know for his rash and irresponsible behavior. 13 years ago he killed two people in Mumbai while driving drunk. At least that's what many people believe. His court case went on for years. Key witnesses turned hostile. Finally today the High Court in Mumbai acquitted him. It has caused a lot of outrage but it's overshadowed by the actor's fan base. Therefore, I was curious to see what people are talking about him. I downloaded just above 100 K tweets and here is the wordcloud: So, "Car" is a pretty boring word to appear so frequently! Yes, it was a car accident, but still. It seems that people are talking about his "drunk" driving or that he was drunk at that time. The word "money" shows up as well, which probably indicates that people are either talking about bribes or money given to victims. If you check the wordcloud car

After terrorism and Paris shooting and all the negativity I decided to use a more playful hashtag for today's wordcloud. Victoria's Secret has their fashion show today and the hashtag that was trending was #VSFashionShow. I downloaded 200K tweets to study the most commonly tweeted model. And it turns out that it's Selena Gomez! Adriana Lima and Candice Swanepoel show up next. Not so much luck for other models though... The sentiment was neutral most of the time. But positive sentiment was definitely more visible than negative. I would have expected a more positive sentiment around this hashtag though.  

Donald Trump is trending for all the wrong reasons. Today he said that Americans should not allow Muslims to enter the country! That's outright demented. But anyway, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to understand what people on Twitter are saying about him. So I downloaded close to 200K tweets and created this wordcloud. Of course, all the talk is around his comments against Muslims. But it looks to me that this is more of chatter from news outlets retweeted by people. Later you will see that the sentiment around Trump is still not as negative as you would expect. Also the derogatory words "Hitler", "dick", and "racist" are quite infrequent.   Here is sentiment graph for Trump. It's surprisingly positive. What's going on Twitter?

Today I didn't use a hashtag to extract tweets. Instead I used the keyword "Eagles" because it's trending a lot. If you are a non American and a non American Football fan like me, you wold wonder whether the keyword is for the bird eagle or the rock band The Eagles. But those in the know would have guessed it that the story is about Philadelphia Eagles who defeated New England Patriots with 35-28. The wordcloud tells the story quite clearly. The most commonly associated word with Eagles is Patriots! Who would have guessed that? The sentiment remains neutral. This is again strange for me but looks like I had not seen it all after all.

This is an update on the San Bernardino shooting. When I created the last post , I had downloaded the tweets before the shooters were identified. People were blaming NRA for the shooting. Now that the killers have been identified as Muslims, suddenly Twitter is blaming all the Muslims! Well, that's reflected in the wordcloud: The sentiment is still neutral though.

Update: Check the companion wordcloud for this here Even as I write this, the events are still unfolding in San Bernardino. Two or possibly three gunmen killed 14 innocent people. You can read up more here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/us/san-bernardino-shooting.html or here: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-san-bernardino-shooting-live-updates-htmlstory.html Anyway, the most trending hashtag is misspelt! It's worth noticing that at this point NRA was quite common. This is because up to this point people were blaming NRA for the tragedy. This has changed since I downloaded the tweets, however! The sentiment for the hashtag is surprisingly neutral. I say surprisingly because now the hastag has become very toxic as the shooters are identified as Muslims. Suddenly there are so many xenophobic comments that I am sure the sentiment would be quite negative now.

I must admit, I don't watch TV. So I had no idea what this hashtag stood for. It was trending worldwide today and so it was worth looking at. Any fans there who can contribute in the comments? The sentiment is quite neutral, I must say!

Today I went for a simple hashtag. Monday was 50th anniversary of A Charlie Brown Christmas and so this hashtag was trending (http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2015/11/30/457859235/a-charlie-brown-christmas-at-50). There were not many tweets necessarily about this hashtag but still I had a few thousand tweets available for the analysis. The wordcloud of course contained the words Charlie and Brown and Christmas. But more importantly it had the name of Snoopy most often appearing in the tweets! Otherwise there were a few words indicating nostalgia. Surprisingly the sentiment was way more neutral than positive. Is it because the older people who were tweeting don't express their happiness more enthusiastically?

Today Kobe Bryant announced his retirement. Kobe is a controversial player for so many reasons and in particular because of the sexual assault case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobe_Bryant_sexual_assault_case). If I have to look beyond all this and just consider his game, I really like Kobe as a player. But unfortunately I can't look beyond the other things :( Nonetheless, Kobe is one of the greatest NBA players, few would disagree with that. I find it interesting that not a lot of positive words were associated with his announcement today (on Twitter at least). I see "MVP", "legendary", and "greatest" showing up but at a much lower frequency than "Lakers", "retire", and "NBA". The sentiment was neutral for the most part but positive bar is also quite tall.

Today's hashtag is TrackOfTheDay, which is clearly about music. I wasn't sure whether this is a promoted hashtag but after looking at the wordcloud I know it was. Shazam is showing up so many times with The Vamps Band, it is a clear indication that this was not organic. Not an issue for me! It shows that worcloud is powerful enough to grab such patterns. The sentiment is highly positive. I am not surprised.

Today when I looked at the trending topics, #PlannedParenthood was among them. But this was not for some nasty thing Donald Trump (or other Republican nominees) said about them. Instead it was for the tragic shooting at their premises in Colorado. http://www.wsj.com/articles/active-shooter-reported-at-planned-parenthood-clinic-in-colorado-1448654443 Three people died in the attack but the alleged shooter was arrested. The wordcloud clearly shows the shooting association with Planned Parenthood although sometimes "prolife" pops up. Presumably the shooter was white so that word also shows up frequently. The sentiment was polarized. This is likely due to the negative words surrounding shooting and positive words surrounding Planned Parenthood and victims (I hope so!)

Macy's is trending! I don't get to use a lot of brand related hashtags so I decided to take this opportunity. Turns out that Macy's Parade hashtag was overwhelmed by the avocado guys, at least when I downloaded the tweets. This is what I like to call hashtag hijacking. So the equally trending hashtag is #AvosToNYC which was coined by the Twitter account @AvosfromMexico The sentiment is bimodal, mixed. I guess many people loved this but several others hated it!

Captain America: Civil War trailer is trending right now! I decided to use this for the wordcloud today using "Civil War" as the search query. For the wordcloud I deleted the obvious words such as "trailer" and the title of the movie. Here is the wordcloud, which looks quite uninformative to me. I don't know why f-word shows up here although less frequently The sentiment is overly positive. No wonder here. People like this guy and they liked the trailer as well!

Yesterday I couldn't get a lot of tweets with the hashtag #RussianPlane. I tried again today with a non hashtag keyword "Russian" and here is what I got: And here is the sentiment, which is way more negative compared to yesterday's graph

Wow this has been a long break since the last post! I have been traveling a lot and so didn't always get time to update the blog. Anyway, I am now in Singapore and hope to update the blog daily. So right now the news that's unfolding is the downing of Russian plane by Turkey. As a result, #RussianPlane has just started trending. I didn't get a lot of Tweets to analyze and the wordcloud is kind of obvious. But for some reason I see Egypt's name popping up a few times. On the positive side I didn't see any reference to WW3! The sentiment around this hashtag is obviously negative.