PEOPLE LOVE AGOOD SMOOCHON A BALCONY

Monitoring mood in the UK via Twitter

Rob Hawkes

BA (Hons) Interactive Media ProductionThe Media School2010-11

PEOPLE LOVE A GOOD SMOOCH ON ABALCONY: MONITORING MOOD IN THE UK VIA TWITTER

Rob Hawkes

BA (Hons) Interactive Media ProductionThe Media School2010-11

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Abstract

This study sets out to experiment with the possibility of using free Webtechnologies to build a tool capable of storing and processing large volumes ofdata, which can then be used to analyse trends in sentiment across the UKusing the ANEW dataset.A system is created to gather, store, and analyse messages on Twitter.Throughout the study this system is optimised to handle larger volumes of data,and generally increase performance for sentiment analysis. By moving fromsingle to multi-core processing, the time it takes to perform analysis can bereduced by around 1200%.Initial analysis of sentiment data shows that maps are an ineffective way tovisualise sentiment over time, particularly over a large geographical area. Bymoving to temporal line graphs signiﬁcant ﬂuctuations in sentiment data can beshown to occur across the period of a week.Further analysis has found that there is a regular sentiment heartbeat on Twitterthat, when smoothed, highlights a consistent and key trend in sentiment acrossthe period of a week. Statistical analysis of these trends with

tests furtherprove that there is a significant difference in sentiment on weekends incomparison to weekdays, correlating with existing studies from the US.Overall, it has been proven that existing Web technologies are capable of thistype of analysis. This study has also proven that there are significant trends insentiment on Twitter, and that these trends can fluctuate during key publicevents across the UK.

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