Little Big Data Analyzed to Glean DOMA Ruling Response on Twitter
July 22, 2013
The article titled What Twitter Had to Say About Doma and Prop 8 on Lexalytics attempts to break down the social media sites statistical response to the Supreme Court rulings handed down on Wednesday, June 26. According to the blog, about 180,000 tweets were posted on Twitter in response to the rulings, and of those tweets twice as many were positive (about 43%) as negative (about 19%). The article explains why this may be slightly misleading,
“As we can see more clearly here in our top themes, some of it is just the wording. Tweets including words such as “Good riddance” are scored by the software as negative, although they obviously aren’t feeling negative about the DOMA and Prop 8 rulings.
The themes “equal liberty”, “same-sex marriage”, and “marriage ruling” are swayed by more technical discussions of the Supreme Court’s actual rulings. “
Even stranger to those interested is the idea that only 180,000 tweets can count as Big Data. Isn’t Big Data supposed to be about terabytes? This seems like a junior sized portion. The article does take care to note that the sample can in no way be called representative of the general population, taking into account that only a small percentage of the general population even uses Twitter.
Chelsea Kerwin, July 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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