In an world of everincreasing interconnectedness, it’s sometimes easy to forget just how substantial and omnipresent social media is. By simply clicking the “send tweet” button, I can share my ideas with a vast web of people from all around the world. Similarly, that tweet, alongside the millions of other tweets that are sent each day, can shed light onto questions about populations as a whole, particularly by researching trends and conversations as they rise and fall in popularity.
Found at http://twitter.github.io/interactive/sotu2014/, this project aims to utilize that concept by analyzing real time trends in the general population’s response to Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address via prominent hashtags and conversations on Twitter.
The project works by cross referencing and ultimately visualizing the topics on Twitter that were trending at the same time as Obama’s State of the Union Address was being given. One can observe from the graph the interesting correlation between the topics that Obama was addressing and the shift in trends. The website goes so far as to allow one a paragraph by paragraph breakdown of the Twitter trends, as well as a heat-map of which states were most and least active on Twitter at a particular point in Obama’s address.
At its core, I believe that data visualization is something that the digital humanities is uniquely equipped to do, and something that this project demonstrates exceptionally. The comparison between social media trends an current events sheds significant insight into the immediate thoughts of the general population that may not have been so easilly uncoverable in the past.
The project is developed and maintained by Twitter Open Source, a subsidiary of Twitter that focuses on the development of open source projects. It follows naturally that a team within Twitter would ultimately utilize that social media platform to carry out their research, but given Twitter’s natural status amongst platforms as a way of sharing one’s immediate thoughts quickly and efficiently, especially regarding political discourse, I believe that Twitter was a logical choice regardless.
The idea of analyzing social trends and utilizing social media to uncover sociological information interests me greatly, and I find myself greatly interested in exploring more of the potential avenues of research one might pursue using this general format, positing questions whose answers lie within the click of a hashtag.
Although I’d dispute whether Twitter is really a good platform for political discussion, I agree that this is a cool analysis. I was unaware of Twitter Open Source before this, and now I’m curious about what kind of projects they do.