social media work
Are you in a happy place?
POSTED IN social media, social media work, twitter, web development work | TAGS : location, physchogeography 14 May 2012
On Friday I got round to doing something I’d been thinking of for a long while. I added location detection to my conversational psychogeography tool. Like the Is Brum Happy? system it takes the latest tweets around a location and rates emotionally sensitive words against a database to give scores for the happiness or emotional wellbeing of the place. If you’re using a HTML 5 browser (you probably are) you can let it reveal your location to the script (it’s not saved anywhere) and it will tell you if where you are (and a mile radius around) is happy right now.
How Christmassy are you feeling?
POSTED IN my projects, portfolio, social media work, web development work | TAGS : christmas, sentiment analysis 16 December 2010
Just a little fun seasonal project I’ve made with the layout and design help of Gavin Wray.
It works very much like my other sentiment analysis tools, but with a sprinkling of Santa’s magic. Santa’s magic in this instance being that any tweets with the words ‘Christmas’ or ‘Xmas’ in them are weighted doubly—that is the scores are counted twice for the purpose of producing the mean score.
So, try the Christmas-o-meter and see how Christmassy you’re feeling.
Sentiment Analysis of a Football Match
POSTED IN my projects, portfolio, social media, social media work, twitter | TAGS : football, sentiment analysis, twitter 2 December 2010
(click through for big)
Last night I turned my sentiment analysis tool on two hashtags: #bcfc and #avfc, the most widely used tags to refer to Birmingham City and Aston Villa during their League Cup quarter final game. It was a chance to see if visualising to ‘competing’ tags around the same event would be a useful exercise.
Caveats that would apply to this:
- Some people use the tags instead of team names, meaning that they might be used by people supporting the other team (or no team at all)—most fans, though seem to tag with just the hashtag representing their team.
- Some tweeters use both—these tweets could be removed technically, but make no difference to the comparative scores.
- If there’s a subject that uses more slang or metaphor than football, it’s not often discussed on Twitter.
There was a generally a downward trend throughout the match, tension? Bad football? It could have been both. The first two goals seemed to have a much bigger impact than the third—this I don’t quite understand, but it seems to be more about the tweets themselves than the tool.
I could see how a special subject-set of emotion words could be created for football, which could cope with more nuanced or unusual words. It’s something to consider.
The sentiment scores in a Google spreadsheet, csv files: #avfc tweets (657 of which were during the game), #bcfc tweets (370 during).
The obligatory Wordle:
Sentiment Analysis and Twitter ‘wormals’
POSTED IN Conferences & Talks, my projects, social media, social media work | TAGS : Conservative Party Conference, cpc10, David Cameron, pdfeu, sentiment analysis, twitter 7 October 2010
I’ve tried two experiments with the “is Birmingham happy” algorithm in the last few days, as they’re not based on place it makes more sense to use the popular term ‘sentiment analysis’ to refer to what it’s doing in this instance. As they were both reasonably short uses it was posible to update the reading often (and use a smaller number of tweets as the sample, giving more variation in the average scores) and give the sentiment graphs a live ‘wormal’ feeling, watching the ratings change over time.
First was on the Personal Democracy Forum EU conference in Barcelona, for the length of the two-day conference I monitored the hashtag #pdfeu every five minutes:
(click image for larger view)
The highest rating was 64.4% (at 12:45pm on Tuesday), the lowest 49.6% (Monday at 12:14pm during a short power failure). What was interesting to me was that the “arousal” rating seemed to work well as it stayed pretty steady during the power failure (or even leaped up a little) even as the happiness of the hashtag users dived. Post-lunch conference lulls and periods of excitement (the big spikes in day two, at least, corresponded with much applause) were mapped quite accurately.
The overall average was 57.29%. If you would like to explore or graph the data yourself, you can see in all in a Google Spreadsheet here.
Secondly I tried a much shorter and more mainstream application, David Cameron’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference:
The emotion tracking tool graphed here ran every 10 seconds during David Cameron’s speech to the CPC and analysed the last 100 tweets with the hashtag #cpc10 and the word “tories”. I chose two versions as I wasn’t sure that non-Conservative supporters would use the ‘official’ hashtag, I theorised that they would be likely to use the word ‘tories’. As it turned out I think that while there was a more even spread of pro and anti political types using the hashtag than I expected, but the ‘tories’ Tweeters were definitely more hostile. (See the data.) There was greater movement across the graph than on any other test I’ve run.
Conclusions? None so far, other than that I think this might be a very useful tool, and that more interesting data is created the more Tweets you have and the more you can afford (server-wise) to poll for results. I’m itching to try it on another big live event with conflicting opinions, that might mean training it on a reality TV event. Roll on the X-Factor.
Is Birmingham Happy?
POSTED IN future web, geodata, my projects, portfolio, social media, social media work, twitter, web development work | TAGS : anew, birminghamuk, conversational psychogeography, emotion, is brum happy, psychogeography, sentiment analysis, twitter, wormal 29 September 2010
I’ve been running a, very rough, scrape of the Birmingham (UK) based interweb for ‘emotional wellbeing’ since April of 2008. Simply put a script running twice a day read in Tweets, news headlines and (originally) blog posts and compared the words within them to a table I’d drawn up of ‘emotion’ words and fairly arbitrary scores.
It was surprisingly interesting to watch: despite its roughness, the internal consistency let patterns emerge. It broadly followed weather and sports results, with some peaks and dips you could map to specific happenings, or news stories.
It lead to a spin off focussing on Tweets from MPs, which I think influenced some of the developments that Tweetminster produced in the next year or so.
It was the patterns that lead me to keep putting off improving the algorithm, but recent Twitter API developments meant I had to do some work anyway and that (together with another project, of which more soon) gave me the impetus to give the project an overhaul. And here’s how it works now…
Twitter’s geolocation services are now much improved, so I can specify a point (the centre of Victoria Square in Birmingham) and a radius (10 miles) and get a reasonably accurate dump of Tweet data back—the algorithm calls for the most recent 1000.
Twitter is now the sole focus of data, in keeping with the ‘conversational pychogeography‘ aims of the project (in essence, words used without too much pre-meditation are more interesting than those written purely for publication). It also provides much more and more reactive data.
The words contained within these tweets are then compared to data from the University of Florida (The Affective Norms for English Words - PDF link). Within that data set each word covered (there are around a thousand in the set I’ve using) is given a score for Valence (sad to happy on a scale 0-10), Arousal (asleep to awake on a scale of 0-10) and Dominance (feeling lack of control to feeling in control on a scale of 0-10). The scores are then collated and a mean calculated. The overall emotional wellbeing score here is calculated as a mean of the three individual means, although the scores are revealed individually on the site.
I’m unsure if combining the results in this way is the best, which is why the site reveals the working — the Twitter feed just goes with one value for ease of understanding and adds a rating adjective too:
if ($brumemotion<100){$rating="fantastic";}if ($brumemotion<90){$rating="superb";}if ($brumemotion<80){$rating="good";}if ($brumemotion<70){$rating="okay";}if ($brumemotion<60){$rating="average";}if ($brumemotion<50){$rating="quiet";}if ($brumemotion<40){$rating="subdued";}if ($brumemotion<30){$rating="low";}if ($brumemotion<20){$rating="dreadful";}if ($brumemotion<10){$rating="awful";}
The Twitter feed produces results twice a day, and these scores are being saved to visualise more graphically, but the website updates every ten seconds (and will self-refresh if you stay on the site) and also displays a word cloud of the currently found ‘emotion words’:
Thoughts on further development
I’ve been experimenting with more local results (here is a version running on just one Birmingham post code — B13) as well as live graphing. I also have a version that will analyse results for a hashtag—something we may use in conjunction with the Civico player to produce ‘wormals’ (graphs of sentiment) during conferences.
But for now, I’m happy to let the new algorithm bed in—wondering about the amount of data and frequency that will be required to see the most detail—and to see what patterns we can spot.
Feedback welcome. Go see for yourself or follow on Twitter.
We’ve won a Webby (almost)
POSTED IN my projects, social media, social media work, twitter, writing work | TAGS : award, birmingham hippodrome, jon bounds, thanks, twitpanto, webby 14 April 2010
While it’s not made the final shortlist of five, there’s still a bit to be proud of as Twitpanto has been made an Honoree (US spelling) in the 2010 Webby Awards in the Net Art category.
As that shortlist includes big budget projects like BBC Blast, I don’t think we’ve done badly seeing as it was one crash hot web guy (that’s Matt, not me) and 20 odd (very) Twitterers on a cold December afternoon (which you can relive, of course, here).
In speech mode, we couldn’t have done it so well without the support of the Birmingham Hippodrome — or the hundreds of people that joined in during the play. Sincere thanks for going along with it.
Quite interesting timing as the RSC’s Twitter Shakespeare project launched this week with much fanfare, in some ways it’s a logical step on from Twitpanto and it’ll be interesting to see how it’s sheer scale affects the experience (a slight overreach of scale was one of the problems I felt with this second panto).
To read all about both Twitter panto experiences there are a couple of long and detailed posts here.
RSC Friends
POSTED IN my projects, social media work | TAGS : blogging, RSC 12 January 2010
Pleased to see the RSC Friends (a subscription group who are fans of the RSC) starting to use their blog. I did a day of training with them last year, most were very new to the idea of blogging but enthusiasm for their subject is carrying them through. They’re planning to use it a little like an online magazine, but hopefully to share their love of theatre to more people.
WordPress MU for BEN PCT
POSTED IN my projects, social media work | TAGS : BEN PCT, consultancy, NHS, Substrakt, WordPress MU 5 January 2010
That hail of acronyms is my way of announcing that the new site for the Birmingham East and North Primary Care Trust that I’ve been consulting on is now live to the public. It’s based on a WordPress MU (multi-user) installation, which will allow the team to very quickly set a new site live for special events and allow individual services or centres to have their own sites, easily administered by them but controlled from one central area.
The design work is by the team at Substrakt, who also developed a plugin to deal with the wide variety of data that can be pulled from the NHS Choices API. (The plugin would be very useful for local blogs as it would automatically allow search and display of local health services — hopefully it can be released publicly). They’ve done a great job of producing an accessible, clear site with in the NHS brand guidelines.
The site is to be run by the team at the PCT, so a lot of the consultancy process has been about making sure they understand as much as possible about the possibilities and the (simple) procedures needed to administer the site — confidence to experiment has been vauable. We decided on WP MU as there are plans for may sites and sub-sites — a MU install can have a site up and running in a matter of minutes, and with a set of themes designed they can all fit the brand straight away. We’ve also set up a system allowing each site to have a completely separate domain name if required — so no-one need know that they’re related to the main PCT site.
The flexibility of WordPress allowed the team to build a mock-up site very quickly, with a very basic theme, and work on the content internally collaboratively — which was then skinned with the completed theme. For the user, the site offers RSS feeds of any of the categories, and many pages will have commenting on — both standard features.
The first of the sub-sites is under development, as well as experiments with the commentariat theme which is a theme built to make consultation on documents easy. I look forward to seeing the developments.
Twitpanto 2009 — The Sequel
POSTED IN microblogging, my projects, social media, social media work, twitter, writing work 4 January 2010
After proving that online pantomime could work last year, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to repeat the trick — but eventually the lure of doing it again with the experience of how it went before proved too much. It does take a long time to organise, and I wanted to do something more complex with the viewing platform which required more tech skills than I had, so I was very grateful to the Birmingham Hippodrome for their support in making it happen.
The structure of the pantomime was very similar to Cinderella last year — there was a cast, who had ‘motivations’ (character bios) and a script to follow (or improvise around), and a private “director” account for prompts and the like during the performance. Most of the differences were to do with how the medium (Twitter) has evolved over 2009:
The main difference is it’s reach — here’s an Alexa (usual caveats apply, Alexa is a skewed sample to both the US and to ‘techies’) graph of PageViews for the Twitter website (remember also that a huge number of Twitter users very rarely have cause to visit the site):
With more users comes both the problems of noise and an altered demographic — it wasn’t possible to rely on as much shared knowledge of either how Twitter works or shared culture if we wanted to reach any more than the same people.
Many people found following Cinderella (last years #twitpanto) hard and were happy to use Matthew Somerville‘s Roomatic hack which highlighted cast members within the stream — but I felt that this would still be too hard to read this year. So, while it was still possible to follow the hashtag any way people liked, I planned a version that separated those ‘on stage’ more completely using two different windows. Here’s my mock up:
The changing nature of Twitter also presented issues for casting, I found difficulty balancing keeping the cast open to as many people as possible, while making sure that they were people who would ‘get’ how to do it difficult. Due to this, and also the possibility of a collision with the Hippodrome’s offline panto (which due to real-world rehearsal commitments didn’t happen) I wrote a scene that would contain characters from other pantomimes, so people could be in it without having much impact on the story.
With increased interest in being in the cast (people were clamouring from May) , I wanted a panto with a good number of characters, but it was also imperative that the plot was very well known. Twitter isn’t a great medium for establishing scene or location, nor one where curtains can be drawn between scenes — there’s also the conceptual problem that there can be no secrets from one character to the other (we ask for suspension of disbelief, unless it’s a good plot point). For that, and the obvious men in tights gags, I chose Robin Hood.
The script this year was written to be less in-jokey than last years (where I not only knew the audience better, but wasn’t attempting to get a wide audience), which was more of a struggle but — with a good chuck of help from Danny Smith — it turned out I think to be a good deal funnier. In fact it’s readable and enjoyable out of context, if I do say so myself.
What I was more sure of this year is that Twitpanto is a collaborative and open piece of art — played out online — and as such the live, free and interactive nature of it is the main thrust. There were over the Christmas period attempts to do “real time” twittering of both Home Alone and It’s A Wonderful Life — interesting, but too tightly scripted to be anything than transposing to a new medium.
The ‘set’ worked, after a few Twitter hiccups, brilliantly — and even more impressively Matthew modified it after the event to allow a replay — it’s the iPlayer for Twitter and very clever. You can watch Twitpanto ‘as live’ here.
It proved a little difficult for the cast to use, I’d advised them to use the Twitter website and keep refreshing, as it wasn’t quite fast enough for them to wait for their cues on anything using the Twitter API. There were also some early web issues for a few of the cast, which contributed to the rocky start.
I also had to stop myself from being overly directorial, I felt at times that some of the improvisation was making it difficult for people to find their cues — disappointingly for me also muddying some of the jokes. But all in all the cast were brilliant in staying in character and interacting with the whole messy experience. It was especially difficult for some with only one or two lines to stay quiet for the duration, in retrospect fewer, bigger, parts work better.
Nudging, which is really all you want to attempt on the social web, is a difficult theatrical directing style to achieve, here’s what Joanna Geary (whose involvement got us a bit of press from The Times) tweeted:
It was better attended than 2008 — the #twitpanto hashtag was one of Twitter’s top ten trending phrases during the “performance” — very unusual for a UK based topic to trend these days. There were over 1,500 tweets containing it between 3:30pm and 4:30pm (1,500 is the limit that Twitter’s search facility can recall on any one search).
Whether the model can work outside the structured chaos of the pantomime I’m not sure, but happy to try (maybe a Shakespeare comedy…), but it’s certainly the most innovative drama experience on the web.
Thanks again to all the cast (find ‘em here) all at the Hippodrome (follow them here), Libby (who contributed last minute lute) and all that participated.
Twitpanto 2009
POSTED IN my projects, social media, social media work, twitter, writing work 14 December 2009
Last year I wrote and “directed” (what I believe to have been) the first proper piece of drama on Twitter — Twitpanto. I still think it’s the only time that attempts to integrate theatre with the social web have gone further than people copying and pasting their lines — or awful “chose what happens next” video series. It worked really well, and this year — on Friday 18th at 3:30pm — it’s happening again.
Thanks to support from the Birmingham Hippodrome we’ve got an improved version of Matthew Somerville‘s “set” for people to watch on. This time it goes a step further that colouring to identify cast from audience — with a stage and stalls. There’s even iCal reminders built in, if you head over too early (go on, head over there now).
The involvement of the Hipp has allowed me to spend more time on the development work than last year, but has made thinking around it a little more challenging — did we need to build in moderation to the stream? Did we need celebrity guests? How much more explanation do “new” Twitterers need?
So far we’ve gone with moderation of a sort, the ability to remove tweets from the audience section (although there wasn’t a single tweet that I’d have removed last year) and not worried about star power — although Joe Pasquale and fellow real-life panto star Ray Quinn have helped with the promotion.
A lot of last year’s cast are returning, including Tom Watson who’s going to play the evil Sheriff of Nottingham. How will it go? Tune in to the #twitpanto hashtag on Friday.
