The Vibes of Ireland

[Andrew49]

In this experiment, approximately four million Tweets originating from Ireland were collected between September 21st and December 14th 2010. Tweets were tagged as being positive, negative or neutral. In doing this, a very accurate picture of how the emotions and moods of people in Ireland change and fluctuate over time.

This is a time-lapse video of how the collective moods of Ireland fluctuate over an average day.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZCiNfna91E"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZCiNfna91E[/ame]

The Vibes of Ireland Website

Interesting as the above is - and it is, the more astounding thing is that all of this was conceived by a 16-year-old student currently attending St. Michaels College, Ailesbury Road, Dublin 4.

[Ah Well]

On a serious note, look how often Offaly is depicted in red on that Map

Offaly is said to have a serious suicide problem at present ... heard someone on the Radio about it a few days back ...

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...288248718.html

[C. Flower]

The midlands consistently look gloomy - can it all be put down to Brian Cowen ?

I think this application of twitter was developed by a school student who entered it into Young Scientist of the Year. He caught my ear when he commented that the budget last year provoked a dip in mood and the IMF loan agreement made people cheer up.

That would suggest to me that the RTE and government drip feed of talk of the EU "giving us funds" went home - and also that confidence in our ability to govern ourselves was at rock bottom.

[Munnkeyman]

Thanks for that Andrew it looks very interesting.

Strangely enough Monday looks to be the gloomiest day in Ireland.
The West is happier

This was entered into the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition 2011 and achieved first place it's category in the Technology section.

[Captain Con O'Sullivan]

Brilliant piece of thinking by that student...

[Griska]

I'm sure young James will have an outstanding career in some far off land.

Dublin, I notice, changes very little and appears to be relatively happy This makes me question the accuracy of this little experiment!

[JamesEggers]

Thanks everybody so much for the nice comments, I appreciate it.

@Griska, first off, thanks so much. And to answer your question, Roughly half of all Tweets that come from Ireland come from Dublin (at the time of testing) and the remaining Tweets are spread across the remaining 31 counties. This creates a "smoothing" effect on Dublin. This is a problem because Dublin contains such a high volume of Tweets, it's mood is more constant, and so the collective mood in Dublin doesn't appear to fluctuate much when compared to the other counties.

Again, thanks everybody.

[C. Flower]

A pleasure James. Please would you keep us in touch with any more developments in twitter analysis ?

[JamesEggers]

Cass, will do, thanks

[C. Flower]

Cass, will do, thanks

Great. Is the design of your project on line anywhere ?

I would be interested in how you measured mood from the tweets.

[5intheface]

Class and fascinating too, what was it Churchill said, the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone?

Apologies to James for using his hard work to take a cheap shot at Tyrone.

[PaddyJoe]

Excellent stuff and clever, original research. A couple of thoughts. I wonder are there ary up to date figures on the amount of people who use Twitter in Ireland? As a subset of that figure is there any clear idea of how many people are active twitterers and how many just use it as a kind of news feed?
Personally I only know two other people who use Twitter and they both use it to keep up with current affairs and breaking news.
I wonder is there any research on the age/occupation profile of Twitter users in Ireland?

[JamesEggers]

Cass, thanks a lot. You can take a look at the project here: http://thevibesofireland.com/. Also, there's a detailed report of how I did it here: http://thevibesofireland.com/report.pdf.

[C. Flower]

Cass, thanks a lot. You can take a look at the project here: http://thevibesofireland.com/. Also, there's a detailed report of how I did it here: http://thevibesofireland.com/report.pdf.

Thanks James I'll be having a good look at that.