Social Futures: Elections, social media and sentiment

Over the past few months during the federal election campaign I was working on a project called ABC Campaign Pulse which was looking for interesting ways to visualise trends and sentiment over the period the election campaign.

After seeing the prominence of social media and data visualisation in the UK election in April and May of 2010 we wanted to see what we could do in an Australian context. We wanted to find ways to filter the noise on social media and make it meaningful and interesting through visual tools and analysis. The project was initiated and conceived by Jess Martin (@gourjess) and Ping Lo (@pinglo) and produced by me and Angela Stegel (@angelastengel) all from the Strategic Development team in ABC Innovation. We also worked in collaboration with ABC News and built the modules to be reusable on other sites across the ABC, for example the ABC Local sites ran the Leaders Today module as part of their sites.

Here is are some screen shots and video demo of the site (and embarrassing voice over)

ABC Campaign Pulse demo from Monique Potts on Vimeo.

Some of the more interesting modules were the Twitter Trends and Hot or Not modules. The Twitter Trends module used a tool called Trendsmap licensed from Stateless Systems was tracking real time twitter trends and chat about the election and overlaying it on a map of Australia based on the origin of the tweets. You could drill down into individual tweet streams for each term and also see how trends changed over the period of the campaign.

The Hot or Not module was trying out sentiment analysis on the 3 leaders and coming up with an aggregate sentiment score for each leader every day. We worked with a company called memery in Brisbane who used a tool called Dialogix to review 10,000 comments and streams overnight from online news articles, blogs, forums, Facebook comments and Twitter reviewed sentiment on each one using natural language analysis. From this it came up with an aggregate sentiment score for each leader each day.

The technology seems to be still pretty much in it's infancy and it couldn't pick up on a lot of the sarcasm and irony which Australians tend to like to use in relation to our political representatives, so we had quite a lot of false positives and negatives. That said it was pretty popular with the audience and pulling in some of the most influential (people with the most followers) positive and negative tweets under each leader certainly added an entertaining element to the site. We were hoping to have it dynamic but ended having to pre-moderate for editorial reasons.