Global Twitter Heartbeat

            Global Twitter Heartbeat reflects the location of sentiments that are sent out via Twitter during two specific timeframes: the 2012 US Presidential Election and the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. While the project is not the first to offer a map of what we are doing in the “Twitterverse” at any given point in time, it is the first visualization that combines population, color tone, and geographic analytics to create an animated heat map. Researchers Kalev H. Leetaru and Shaowen Wang based at the University of Illinois use the SGI UV 2000 Big Brain supercomputer at to power the project. According to a press release from SGI in Hamburg, Germany on June 18, 2012, “the new design creates a level of accessibility to large coherent memory systems for researchers while enabling users to find answers to the world’s most difficult problems on a system as easy to administer as a workstation.”

            During the Hurricane Sandy Tweetbeat, the colors on the map are representative of the way Twitter users were feeling, according to the tweets that were posted. The color red was representative of a more negative sentiment, whereas the color blue represented of a more positive sentiment. Every tweet is therefore analyzed to assign location in the processing of the text itself. In the case of the presidential election however, blue represented pro-Barack Obama tweets and red for pro-Mitt Romney tweets. In a video that captures the election through Tweetbeat it must be recognized how much blue appears on the US map when Obama gives his victory speech. It is apparent that these maps are not telling us anything that we didn’t know (Obama won the election and people were concerned about Sandy…so what?). What then is the point of this project then, when “the world’s largest data-mining machine” can be doing other productive projects like “ingesting the entire contents of the U.S. Library of Congress print collection in less than three seconds?”

            This new technology allows for us to peer into the heartbeat of our society that revolves around social media and sharing. With this new “telescope,” it is expected that it will be used for other informational needs, especially advertising. With the ability to collect a general consensus on most topics on Twitter, we will not only have access to our own country’s ideas, but others as well. The development of Twitter was initially intended for media users to “follow” everything from news to specific individuals who are found to be the most compelling and interesting. It later grew to become a way of advertising and promoting for businesses towards their followers. One can see photos, videos, and full on conversations and is thus exposed to news within seconds. With just a simple Tweet, millions of people are notified when a major event has occurred in one area of the country, however it is a lot more personal than hearing it from the news. The Global Twitter Heartbeat project demonstrated how scientists, and eventually marketers, can use high performance computers to track real-time unstructured data.

http://infosthetics.com/archives/2012/11/tweetbeat_what_were_the_sentiments_on_twitter_during_hurricane_sandy.html           

Popkin, Helen. "Supercomputer Uses Twitter to Tell How You're Feeling." Technology on NBCNews.com. NBC News, n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2013. <http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/supercomputer-uses-twitter-tell-how-youre-feeling-1C7073314>.