The Day After The Night Before & Other Things

#mayordebate

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There was a time when event organisers had very little access to information about the reaction of participants to their events or indeed the overall impact of them. Social media is helping to change that. Take this years Britain's Got Talent where they put an individual hashtag on screen for each act. Simon Cowell or more likely one of Simon Cowell's more technically capable underlings is able to gather up all this information and see which act the public like most.

Here are some of the tweets containing the #mayordebate hashtag from the big Mayoral Debate put on by The Standard each bar represents a minute you can see at the height of the debate people where tweeting about it up to 40 times a minute.

There are other things that could be done with the data:

• Sentiment analysis can be used to discover reaction
• This can be divided over time to find which were the popular/unpopular bits
• Text mining can be used with sentiment classified tweets to find out what words were associated with positive/negative tweets to find out what people liked about something.
• You can find out who's tweeting about your event/issue the most and with sentiment analysis you can find out who you're biggest supporters and dectractors are.
• Once you start gathering data then you can compare over time. Was it more popular than last year? Did the same Tweeters like it again this year as last ? Did the effort you put into solving a problem you found last year pay off this year? 

One of the great things about this kind of data analysis is it's scalability. You could use it for something relatively small like a public meeting going up the scale a music festival or reaction to a natural disaster or the Olympics. 

Big reads for big data

This is my new favourite article it's called Big Data, BAD preditictions, and How to Improve It? and you can read it here

mySociety plug

In other news the good people of mySociety are having a data day some point in the not too distant future. If you don't know about mySociety and are interested in data or democracy or indeed both you really should. Here's the blurb.

mySociety is the organisation behind such websites as WhatDoTheyKnow, TheyWorkForYou, FixMyStreet and FixMyTransport. Each of these sites generates a large amount of potentially newsworthy data every day. Now we'd like to invite anyone with an interest in data journalism - or mySociety more generally - to join our team for a day's workshop in central London.

We'll collaboratively discover the stories that will make the news - you tell us the data you'd like to see, and we'll do the hacking. Here are just a few examples of stories waiting to be mined - but with your input, we expect to discover many more. - WhatDoTheyKnow is our Freedom of Information site. It contains archives of over 100,000 FOI requests. Which bodies have received the most requests? And what are the most common concerns of those making them? - TheyWorkForYou keeps tabs on the nation's representatives, and publishes a complete record of Hansard.

Which are the most frequently spoken words in Parliament?

Which MP has uttered the largest share of them? - FixMyStreet allows users to report problems such as potholes to the relevant local authority.

Which council has the highest number of reports per capita?

What are the seasonal trends in problem types? - FixMyTransport makes it easy to contact the operators when there's a problem with your public transport journey.

What are the major issues in Britain's public transport today?

Which routes are the trouble hotspots?

Check here for more details.