Olympics Reaction To Light Up The London Eye

Here’s a pretty cool experiment in social media data gathering. Every day through the end of the Olympics, Great Britain’s EDF Energy will light up the London Eye based on sentiment toward the Games on Twitter. The Eye, known to the rest of the world as that giant Ferris wheel on the opening credits of Sherlock, will cycle through 24 hours worth of Twitter reaction in 24 minutes at 9pm and 10 PM British Standard Time (3 PM and 4 PM Eastern in the United States). How? Check out this video for more information.

And some more detail on information interpretation from EDF.

Throughout London 2012 we will be measuring the Energy of the Nation by reading the raw Twitter feed and filtering it for those tweets originating from the UK that make reference to the Olympics.

The content, hashtags and links inside the tweets will be scanned for words and phrases like “Olympics”, “Torch Relay”, “#energy2012”, “London 2012” and related terms to determine their context.

Our library of words is vast and features traditional phrases, modern terms and even colloquialisms used around the country from Aberdeen to Anglesey.

Tweets that make it through the filter will be passed through a sentiment algorithm that determines the amount of positive and negative emotion contained in the message.

So, emotional words like “brilliant” (+3) and “failure” (-4) will be given scores and for each sentence, booster (or negative) words such as “very” (+1), “almost” (-0.6), or “never” (*0) will modify the emotional score of any of the words they are found near.

Punctuation is also taken into account to boost (!!!) or reduce (?!?!) the energy count.

A large library of positive and negative emoticons like :( (sad face) or :) (smiley face) will also be used to discover ‘non-verbal’ sentiment.

By tallying these counts of positive and negative scores over time, charts of the daily energy of the nation will be made. The ratio of positive to negative energy is then expressed in a simple pie chart.

You can follow the energy map and see video of the daily light show by visiting the EDF Energy Map. The London Eye website has a breakdown of what to expect during the nightly show. The Eye will also be lit during the Paralympics next month.