One Wordcloud A Day

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 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.

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...