One Wordcloud A Day

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.

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.

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!)

Today ISIS was trending and I decided to make a wordcloud from that rather than using any trending hashtag. The wordcloud shows context-specific words, obviously linking to Paris attacks. But there are some other interesting words patterns too. I thought this was very interesting. In particular the news that Anonymous is taking on ISIS has struck a cord with people. Also, there is some talk about Obama. Perhaps calling for him to fight with ISIS with more intensity? Putin's name shows up a bit as well. Interestingly only these two world leaders show up often. French president Hollandes is curiously absent! The sentiment is very negative, as expected.

Today was a dark day. So many innocent people died in Paris attacks. I decided to make a wordcloud of #ParisAttacks, the most trending hashtag as of right now. Ususally I download 100K tweets and then clean them up. There was some problem with my internet today so I had time to download on 50K. Anyways, that's a big number right there. There are some very interesting patterns that are popping out. Lights is the most frequent word followed by "world." ANy idea why? I couldn't figure out yet. Another hashtag that was trending earlier #PrayForParis was also used quite often with this hashtag. Looks like people have concluded that it was ISIS behind the attacks. Luckily xenophobic comments seem to be limited because the word "muslims" is now as frequent as it would be if the comments were racist. The sentiment graph below also shows a similar pattern. And here is the sentiment graph. Nothing much groundbreaking here. The positive sentiment is stronge...