#SOTU2014: See the State of The Union address minute by minute on Twitter
#SOTU2014: See the State of The Union Address minute by minute on Twitter breaks down the topics discussed by citizens of America in real time as the Union Address unfolds. The project visualizes when spikes in topics occur and where those spikes are from through graphs and maps. The presentation of the website is easy to maneuver as there are only a few subjects with which the user can interact with. The user can select the text, the dialogue of the address, to find which subject matter is pertinent to citizens during specific sections.
The project sources posts from twitter during the timeframe of the speech by searching for keywords related to the subjects talked about on the State of the Union Address. Twitter did this by searching through tweets tagged with “#sotu” and searched for words that could be related to the topic discussed in the speech. For example, a tweet using the word “medical” could be added to the topic of healthcare.This was done in time for every minute of the speech. Visualizing this information, however, proved tricky as the information needed to be legible yet detailed. The team started with a graph of dots representing when spikes for certain topics occurred. However, the need for more text analysis forced the team to go with the current representation of data. The new representation includes annotated data which will allow the user to click on a section of the speech and view the most discussed subjects by users. There was also the addition of the map of the United States, to allow viewers to understand where topics are being discussed, and a bar graph visualizing specific topics. The final product successfully allows audiences to understand the importance of data from twitter, and similar apps, as it collects the concerns of citizens in real time. Information like this is pertinent to law making and legislation as it highlights the concerns of people in certain communities. It does beg the question, though, how accurate can we get when compiling this information? For this project twitter users had to use #sotu, though it is possible many people did not. It will be interesting to discover how the digital humanities community may continue to develop more accurate visualizations.
1 thought on “Blog Post #2”
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
I also chose this project to look at and I never thought about the tweets without the “#sotu”. Instead of only using the “#sotu” hashtag to qualify a tweet they should open it up to more tags like “#POTUS”, “StateoftheUnion”, and other politics related hashtags. I also think it is really important to also consider that some tweets may also not speak for the population of the state/nation because twitter creates such niche spaces that are stuck in a feedback loop. I really enjoyed your thoughts on this because it gave me more insight about the project that I did not think of.