

Election analyzed through Twitter data - majia
http://twithinks.mit.edu/blog

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RyanIyengar
I'm reminded distinctly of this response to the idea that you can divine
greater insight from diving deep into the words of Twitter users:
[http://barthel.tumblr.com/post/22521415345/you-can-see-in-
tw...](http://barthel.tumblr.com/post/22521415345/you-can-see-in-twitter-the-
mood-of-the-nation-he)

~~~
majia
There was a huge hype around Twitter data one or two years back. Then it was
followed by suspicion and criticism Now we should take a more balanced view.
Twitter data or social media data aren't all-powerful, but I believe that if
we look at it from the right perspectives, we still could learn something
meaningful, despite its demographic bias. But certainly we have to be very
cautious about any conclusion we draw. This is still a work in progress and
we'll try to extract unbiased information from the biased source.

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redorblue
A different approach that takes the social network graph into account is
presented on <http://www.celebs-vote.com>

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yuvalb
This seems to be a smoothed signal. Could it be that the smoothing carries
some of the winning candidate mentions 'back in time'?

~~~
majia
Good observation! It is actually a seven-day smoothing to offset some weekly
periodicity, but the backward influence is very limited. We tested this with a
hourly granularity without smoothening (the curves become really fuzzy), and
it shows very similar results.

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onetwothreefour
I read the whole thing and learned absolutely nothing.

It would have been nice to have a conclusion at the end... :)

~~~
majia
Social media data and election are both very subjective topics. We tried to
generate some insights, but we thought it would be better to let readers to
interpret results themselves.

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haox
nice webpage. i like the map!

