Monitoring Midterm Election Night Through Twitter Buzz
Yesterday November 2nd 2010 was midterm election day in the US. I was curious what Twitter would tell us about the mood of the voters. It was already clear that things did not look good for the Democrats. In prior work analyzing data from 2009 we had already found that monitoring posts for the occurrence of “hope”, “happy”, “fear”, and “worry” would give us a good proxy for the mood of the population, particularly if we focused on the retweeted posts. So this time I repeatedly ran our Twitter data collector in 30 minute intervals, each time collecting the 200 most retweeted Tweets containing either hope, happy, fear, or worry. The picture below shows all tweets, with the red dots depicting the tweets containing more than one of the search words. Measuring the betweenness value (i.e. the importance of the search term) shows that popular tweeters prefer tweeting about “happy” (32%) and “hope” (30%) over the “worry” (19%) and “fear” (19%) tweets. Note that I collected precisely the sam...