Apple Fruit References in Tweets

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Fri, 02 Oct 2009

This is the fourth part in a series analyzing a years worth of tweets containing the word 'apple'. The first three sections are:

  1. Apple Brand References in Tweets
  2. Company References in Tweets
  3. Simplistic Sentiment Mining from Tweets
This section looks at use of the word 'apple' as a fruit rather than as the company Apple.

The graphs below showing distribution over time have been normalized to remove the trend of increasing number of tweets over time. This helps show the underlying patterns related to the specific term of interest. Note that the month labels are positioned at the beginning of the month.

Here are a few observations:

  • 'pie' has a series of small peaks in the fall with a huge peak at the end of Nov for American Thanksgiving and strong peaks as well for Christmas and July 4th
  • 'cider' is used primarily in the fall with a huge drop-off right after Christmas/New Years
  • both 'juice' and 'sauce' are fairly consistent during the year although 'juice' seems to have an increase in references during the warmer months of Mar-Aug
  • 'crumble' has roughly 4 times as many references as 'cobbler'
  • 'picking' shows a very strong regular pattern of peaks localized to September and October. They appear to correspond to fall weekends where people talk about going apple picking.
  • There is a strong peak for apple + 'cookies' at the end of April beginning of May that falls off fairly slowly. I'm not sure why. Google Trends shows a similar pattern although not as strong.

 


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