The big story has been about how the cast of Hamilton gave a small speech to Michael Pence, the vice president elect of the US. More on this story is available here: I decided to use a different type of wordcloud today. In order to test it, I used a much smaller corpus of tweets, just 2000. Here is the wordcloud Clearly people are talking a lot about Pence and the cast but Trump shows up a lot too. This is because Trump decided to attack the cast on Twitter. The sentiment around this episode is unsurprisingly negative.
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The big news today is that a plane carrying 66 people from Paris to Cairo has disappeared. Just now Guardian reported that French president Hollande has confirmed that the plane has crashed but no cause for the crash has been determined yet. The plane is still missing though. The wordcloud is as expected talking about the flight from Paris to Cairo. It's speculated that the plance went down in the Mediterranean and that's why you see this word appearing a few times in the tweets. It seems that the tweets are simply spreading this news. There is a little mention of prayers. Literally no mention of terrorism or terrorist, which implies that people are not openly speculating that yet. The sentiment is surprisingly positive. I can't figure out why! Perhaps the tweets mentioning prayers, praying, families, thoughts, etc. are adding to this.
Google's largest annual event - the I/O conference - is taking place right now. You can find more news about it on Techcrunch or other tech blogs I have around 32K clean tweets for the analysis. I was interested in knowing which Google products get most mention. I didn't use Google in the wordcloud because it would be obviously the most commonly used word. Well, as it turns out Android is the most popular product that was discussed in these tweets. Allo is the new chat app that Google introduced to take on iMessage. Overall sentiment was quite positive but there were still around 18% negative tweets. These could be because of Google invited people to suggest what its next version of Android should be called. It starts with N so basically it was open to a lot of racist jokes.
Today George Zimmarman is trending because he announced that he will auction off the gun he used to kill Treyvon Martin. It's pretty sad. Anyway I decided to use this search term for getting the wordcloud because generally I don't have negative keywords on this blog. I was also curious to know whether people on Twitter will support him or oppose him. As it's apparent from the sentiment graph, a majority of Twitter users disliked the news. The sentiment is overly negative with only about 10% people saying positive things about it. In the wordcloud, the main discussion topic is "gun" and words around it. This is not surprising because George Zimmarman usually is not trending. So this bunch of tweets are all about the auctioning of the gun. I think a lot of people also were a bit outraged because his name is "trending" on Twitter. But by showing this outrage probably they added to the trending topic! For example, this tweet received a lot of
The big news in the technology sector today is that SpaceX, the company owned by Elon Musk, launched a satellite and successfully retrieved the first stage vehicle, which they can now reuse. More details about the story are here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/05/06/a-spacex-rocket-just-stuck-its-landing-on-a-barge/ There was a hashtag trending today but when I started the download, I didn't get many tweets. Then I decided to download the non hashtagged tweets and there I received plenty. The wordcloud is quite interesting because the most commonly occurring word is Mars. This is because SpaceX is planning to send a rocket to Mars in 2018 and it seems that this week there has been some talk about that announcement. Also, with today's successful landing of the first-stage rocket, people are likely speculating the success of a Mars mission in near future. I found it interesting that people didn't have a lot of mentions for Elon Musk himself.
I haven't watched the new Batman Vs Superman movie yet. Not sure when I will get to watch it either. But I saw a lot of people either saying great things about the movie or complaining vociferously. It then made sense to see what people are saying on Twitter. Now before you see the wordcloud and sentiment graph, I must make clear that the movie is a big hit setting records. While it registered the most successful opening in the history with more than $100 million collection, the second weekend saw the largest drop ever recorded for a movie with such a massive opening! Boxofficemojo has more details if you are interested: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=4173&p=.htm People are clearly talking about Batman much more than Superman! Similarly, we see that Ben Affleck was mentioned quite frequently. Many frequently occurring words are positive - awesome, better, great, loved, amazing, etc. There are a few negative words as well. But the overall sentiment seems positive, w
Perhaps by now you must have heard about the biggest news of this year. A Panama based company Mossack Fonseca which helped create shell companies to many rich people around the world in order to do legal as well as illegal things (hiding taxable income, corruption money, etc.) sprouted a major leak. More than 11 million documents amounting to 2.6 TB were leaked to journalists. You can read everything about this here: http://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/en/ The size of the leak is enormous! Here is a graph for comparison: In light of this #panamapapers hashtag has been trending today. I downloaded more than 200K tweets but only around 34,000 were original and rest were retweets. Here are the wordcloud and sentiment graph
I don't watch TV so can't comment much about the Fox show Empire . But yesterday #Empire was trending because they had a midseason premiere recap so I analyzed it. This website says that Empire got great ratings and viewed by more than 12 million people yesterday. As it turns out Hakeem Lyon is one of the fictional characters on the show and he got Twitter talking! If you actually watch this show you will enjoy the wordcloud much more. To my surprise the sentiment was not as positive as I had expected based on what I found about the premiere. With the amazing ratings, the positive sentiment should have been much higher. I suspect that it may have to do with the way this sentiment analysis algorithm works. I am planning to change it soon so I will come back to this hashtag and see whether I get different results.
If you haven't checked it already, there has been a hijacking of an Egypt Air plane, which was forced to land in Cyprus. The hijacker is now arrested. Read more about this on Bloomberg and there is an interesting video of a hostage climbing out of the plane at Telegraph . Here is the wordcloud accompanied by the sentiment graph.
On Saturday 3 states -- Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington -- had Democratic primaries. In all the three states Bernie Sanders won by a huge margin over Hillary Clinton. This is quite an achievement because so far Clinton has been winning many delegates. When I checked earlier, the hashtag #HIcaucus was tending so I downloaded tweets that included it. There is no surprise how the wordcloud looks. Also the sentiment is quite positive which indicates that Bernie supporters were using this hashtag. The news media was silent for a long period about this news. Some Bernie supporters claimed that this is because media is biased against Bernie.
I made this wordcloud for #Brussels at the backdrop of the terror attack. I collected 400,000 tweets, out of which around 81,000 were original and usable. It's great to see that people were so much concerned about the victims. The wordcloud mentions "people" and "thoughts" most frequently followed by "airport" and "attacks" and more importantly "prayers". The sentiment was split. This is not surprising because many of the tweets would carry negative and positive words all at the same time. Therefore, getting a polarized graph is totally expected.
This hashtag is trending on Twitter's 10th birthday. Twitter, unfortunately, is not in a great shape. Since its IPO, the stock is down close to 60%. For comparison, Facebook stock is up 134% in the same period! Nonetheless, The wordcloud is all good. So is the sentiment chart. I really hope that Twitter survives and celebrates many more birthdays!