One Wordcloud A Day

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 I downloaded tweets for the show #XFactor as this hastag was sort of trending. I didn't want to get one more sports related hashtag. I wasn't too hopeful about this because I thought the hashtag wasn't necessarily trending. But I was wrong! I could quickly get 100K tweets and to my surprise I found that the wordcloud was dominated by certain words ("factor" was sort of obvious but I didn't anticipate it). This is an indication of a lot of retweets. So for me now is the time to adjust the code to remove retweets. But I am not sure whether to remove them because that will mean that we put the same weight on all the tweets not taking into account the popularity (through retweets in this case. I haven't looked into the favorite tweets so far). Anyway, here is the wordcoud. The word "Olly" shows up because it's the name of the presenter of the show and it seems that he screwed up by telling a contestant the outcome before the results were...

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...

Today a funny hashtag was trending so I decided to use it. Most of the hashtags I have explored so far have been for politics or music. So this presents some change. Ex ante I expected that there will be a weird wordcloud because there may not be any common theme here. Well it turns out that I was almost right. There is the word "midnight" that shows up a lot in the tweets with this hashtag. As it turns out midnight is an account name that shows up with this hashtag as this tweet suggests: Revolutionary Hashtag War #InternetThePast @midnight — John Cioch (@John_Cioch) November 13, 2015 Midnight is a "late night game show thing hosted on Comedy Central" But apart from that other words look more or less uniformly distributed. The words "pointsme" also shows up slightly more frequently compared to the other words but I don't know what that is. The sentiment  for the hashtag was highly polarized. I had no idea about this going in but this is ...

Sorry for the break over the last few days. I was in Shanghai and all Google services are blocked there including Blogger.com. Also, Twitter is blocked so I couldn't get any tweets to analyze. Now that I am back in Singapore, here is the wordcloud for today. Trump is at the center of the GOP debate! He is killing it (on Twitter at least). Interestingly Ted Cruz and Rubio are now showing up. Fiorina and Carson get a few mentions. But look at Jeb Bush! Can you even spot him here? The sentiment is as expected. Clearly way more positive than negative.

Today when I checked the trending hashtags, this one popped up. It came from Justin Bieber's Twitter account so his name appears quite often. Anyway, the wordcloud is here   The sentiment graph is here. It's quite polarized and there are not many neutral tweets!  

Today's hashtag was #CMA awards (Country Music Association awards). I downloaded the tweets from Cambodia but then couldn't get time to complete the analysis. Anyway, I am not back in Singapore and so here is today's wordcloud. Guess who is trending with CMA awards? It's Justine Timberlake. Miranada Lambert also appears several times. No wonder the word "country" appears often (I should have removed it from the wordcloud)   The sentiment was quite positive. This is a good thing for the CMA awards, right?