One Wordcloud A Day

Yesterday Lakers was trending so I downloaded the usual 300K tweets (around 111K original and rest retweets). I didn't know why Lakers were trending so I was curious to learn it from the wordcloud. Well, looks like Lakers beat Warriors. After reading the news it's actually quite a big win with 112-95!   The sentiment was surprisingly quie negative (recall that Twitter sentiment is usually positive).  

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!

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.

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.