Blog Post 2 – #SOTU2014

“#SOTU2014” is a website, made by Nicolas Belmonte and Simon Rogers, that broke down the State of the Union address in 2014 by the most popular topics that people were tweeting at the moment in the address and which states were the most engaged for each part of the address.

Sources

All the data came from Twitter, now X, data and the data was broken up by each minute of the State of the Union. So based off of what was being tweeted at the time, each tweet would get categorized to a topic based on the keywords in the tweet. For example, if tweets mentioned “war,” “army,” “afghanistan,” then we would tag those tweets as belonging to the topic “defense”; and so on. 

Process

The actual graphics of the website were created with the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit made by Nicolas Belmonte. This JavaScript helps create interavtive graphics for the web and was used to create the Streamgraph, the map describing the engagment for each moment of the State of the Union, and the bar chart that showed which topic was the most engaging at the moment.

Presentation

We see which topics were gaining and losing tractions over the course of the State of the Union with the streamgraph. The map fo the U.S shows which states where the most engaged in the selected topic depending on how dark or light the state was. The stacked bar graph shows which topics where the most prevalent for each portion of the State of the Union.

Question

After thoroughly looking at the project, I am now interested in how this would look for State of the Union addresses after 2014 and what if there was a way to visualize the different political affiliations and how they are different or similar to each other and the way they intereact with the State of the Union on Twitter.

In Class Questions

The goal of this project is to show how people are talking about the State of the Union during the event. Seeing how certain topics are important to certain states and visualizing that those issues are creating a dialouge in those states.

I think the audience for this project is the overall population, we want to see what matters to our state but we also are curious about what other states are passionate about. The graphic visualization makes it easily understadnabe for everyone about the topics important for the nation and individual states.