Obama Inauguration As Seen Through Twitter

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2009

There was obviously a lot of attention directed towards Obama's inauguration last week. Naturally, this extended to the twittersphere and there were a huge number of Twitter messages regarding the event. I've built a new interactive visualization to support exploring these messages along the dimensions of time, geography, and the actual message content.

The video below is a bit fuzzy but gives an idea of what the tool does. For those who want to jump right to the application you can find it here: Obama Inauguration As Seen Through Twitter .

Video only - interactive application is here

The application supports scrolling back and forth through time or animating the changes over time. The map support allows the standard zooming and panning as well as having special buttons to frame both the US and the whole world with one click. The mouse wheel can also be used to zoom in and out. There is text filtering support where you can enter one or two different strings and see which messages match.

I started with about 126,000 tweets but took a subset based on those that expressed strong sentiment and for which I was able to get proper geographic coordinates. The final application uses 11,389 messages. The sentiment filtering step likely had the effect of removing many of the non-English messages since it involved counting English high impact words (love,hate,beautiful,sucks etc).

This is my first map-based application on Neoformix and it was created much more easily because I was able to build it on top of something called Modest Maps. A special thanks go to Tom Carden of Stamen Design and the others who created it !

Full credits:

Give it a try ! Obama Inauguration As Seen Through Twitter

 


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