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Show HN: Tracking voter discussion of the Presidential debates

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Re: Show HN: Tracking voter discussion of the Presidential debates

#21
post #2

What do you like? What don't you like?

Also, filtering options would be great, for example only viewing tweets from independents, or only ones that mention Romney.

Good ideas, all. There are a couple more debates. :-)

In the meantime, if you want to play with filters, feel free to try this super-alpha toy I threw together the other day: https://www.votizen.com/twitter-fight/. It works on a rolling 24-hour window of Romney- or Obama-mentioning tweets. Buggy as heck, but fun to play with!

Re: Show HN: Tracking voter discussion of the Presidential debates

#23
post #2

What do you like? What don't you like?

This is clever and I find it highly entertaining to read all of the trolls and flamebait. The white flash when the graphs update is extremely irritating to me.

I removed the on-update flash.

Re: Show HN: Tracking voter discussion of the Presidential debates

#24
I'd be interested in the trending between points. For example I would just love to see how the trend went after a candidate said certain things and indeed trend based upon the last N minutes. The one which Romney says "I'm gonna (sounded like that too me) stop the subsidy to PBS", Now that would be interesting too me, along with many other statements by them both.

Fascinating stuff, I also noted a few posts positive to romney that wer associated as obama as obama was mentioned and vice a versa. I suspect a first mentioned corralation, though have seen exceptions to that, i'd paste examples but no pause button and late. To truely seperate those type of posts is something were you will need to crowdsource down the line if only to learn a rule set. Though tweets are short so permutations will not be that dynamic as apposed to more open social means and with that the limitation can only help.

Anybody aware of a ruleset that can weight one person over another based upon the content of block of text that mentions both people. Certainly would have uses beyond this. Amazing how something so simple as that involves alot more than you would initialy think.

Re: Show HN: Tracking voter discussion of the Presidential debates

#25
post #24

I'd be interested in the trending between points. For example I would just love to see how the trend went after a candidate said certain things and indeed trend based upon the last N minutes. The one which Romney says "I'm gonna (sounded like that too me) stop the subsidy to PBS", Now that would be interesting too me, along with many other statements by them both. Fascinating stuff, I also noted a few posts positive…

What you're talking about in the last paragraph is sentiment analysis. This is really cool stuff, but it's tricky. Even if you have 2 humans do sentiment analysis independently, they agree with each other only 70% of the time. Computers tend to do worse, of course.

What makes it extra challenging is that tweets are short, so you have wide error bars on the sorts of math you'd depend on in larger corpuses. I think you'd have to actually bang a parser against it and try to understand what the tweeter is saying.

Re: Show HN: Tracking voter discussion of the Presidential debates

#26
post #24

I'd be interested in the trending between points. For example I would just love to see how the trend went after a candidate said certain things and indeed trend based upon the last N minutes. The one which Romney says "I'm gonna (sounded like that too me) stop the subsidy to PBS", Now that would be interesting too me, along with many other statements by them both. Fascinating stuff, I also noted a few posts positive…

What you're talking about in the last paragraph is sentiment analysis. This is really cool stuff, but it's tricky. Even if you have 2 humans do sentiment analysis independently, they agree with each other only 70% of the time. Computers tend to do worse, of course. What makes it extra challenging is that tweets are short, so you have wide error bars on the sorts of math you'd depend on in larger corpuses. I think you…

Btw, here's an example of somebody trying to do sentiment analysis on tweets: http://www.sentiment140.com/search?hl=en&query=romney.

Re: Show HN: Tracking voter discussion of the Presidential debates

#27
post #14

It's a fun visualization to have up as a dashboard, I think I'll keep it running during the debates. I love the design; it's very easy to read, and the simplicity and color make it easy to digest information at a glance. My constructive criticism: For the word frequency charts at the top of the screen, I'd weed out common words, and/or try to combine words into meaningful phrases. http://www.wordle.net/ does a good j…

We have weeded out a bunch of stuff and are actually handling n-grams, but apparently not with enough weight since they aren't showing up ever. What words do you think shouldn't be there?

Looks, Look, Good

Also, you should think about stemming - "Looks" and "Look" should be in an equivalence class.

Re: Show HN: Tracking voter discussion of the Presidential debates

#28
post #27
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have weeded out a bunch of stuff and are actually handling n-grams, but apparently not with enough weight since they aren't showing up ever. What words do you think shouldn't be there?

Looks, Look, Good Also, you should think about stemming - "Looks" and "Look" should be in an equivalence class.

Perhaps we can bang a Snowball stemmer against it and get pretty good coverage on the whole language.

Re: Show HN: Tracking voter discussion of the Presidential debates

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, filtering options would be great, for example only viewing tweets from independents, or only ones that mention Romney.

Good ideas, all. There are a couple more debates. :-) In the meantime, if you want to play with filters, feel free to try this super-alpha toy I threw together the other day: https://www.votizen.com/twitter-fight/ . It works on a rolling 24-hour window of Romney- or Obama-mentioning tweets. Buggy as heck, but fun to play with!

I was wondering what the time window is for the "voters are saying" bar charts. Seemed too long and static... wish those charts were more dynamic.

Re: Show HN: Tracking voter discussion of the Presidential debates

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good ideas, all. There are a couple more debates. :-) In the meantime, if you want to play with filters, feel free to try this super-alpha toy I threw together the other day: https://www.votizen.com/twitter-fight/ . It works on a rolling 24-hour window of Romney- or Obama-mentioning tweets. Buggy as heck, but fun to play with!

I was wondering what the time window is for the "voters are saying" bar charts. Seemed too long and static... wish those charts were more dynamic.

It is cumulative. I think I agree with you, though. I'll think about how to do rolling for the next debate (Oct 11.)
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