Visualising Twitter Buzz on Football Games
The Guardian, a great resource when it comes to statistics and visualisation, has done a great job visualising Twitter data about the World Cup 2010 matches in an interesting way. They count how often certain terms are contained in tweets during each match minute.
Here is how it looks during the opening match (Soutch Africa vs. Mexico) in minute 77:
Though I really like the visualization and the behaviour of the items, I was curious of how the data really “looked” when a complete match was displayed. So I created my own interactive visualization using the same data.
The screenshot above shows how all tweets are displayed a histogram with one bar per match minute. Each color stands for a specific term. When hovering the bars with the mouse pointer, all recorded terms are displayed underneath with bars displaying the amount of mentions.
Most interestingly, the comparison of the two visualisations shows that the Guardians way of visualisation is much more capable of issueing emotions. Looking at their bursting bubbles, one can almost here the Vuvuzelas. Histograms can’t do that, as it seems.
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