emoto — Visualising the online response to London 2012

emoto is a unique data art project that sets out to visualise the worldwide emotional response to the Olympic Games 2012. We track social media sites for themes related to the games and analyse the messages for content and emotional tone, using the datasift platform. The collected emotion data can be tracked real-time in our web-based visualisation as the events unfold, and experienced in an on-site installation in London. After the games, a tangible data sculpture serves as an aggregate archive of the collective response to the games.

Building a platform which visualises the social media response to a large scale event in real-time poses some significant challenges in system and UI design. In this talk, we will shed some light on the technical and design decisions involved, and how to effectively deal with large stream of social media messages. We will also discuss how data analysis, UI prototypes and system design continuously need to cross-fertilize in order to create a sound and engaging overall experience for the users.

Transcript

1. Drew Hemment, Moritz Stefaner, Gerrit Kaiser Strata London, October 2012 Visualising the online response to London 2012
2. Creative team Moritz Stefaner Drew Hemment (Future Everything) Studio NAND A FutureEverything project for London 2012 Festival and the Cultural Olympiad programme. Funded by Arts Council England and WE PLAY/Legacy Trust UK. Infrastructure design & development by Gerrit Kaiser. Citizen journalism by Andy Miah Evaluation and blogging by Ege Sezen. Project management by Leon Seth and Nick Lawrenson. Communications by Jo Williams, Anita Morris Associates. Emoto is produced by FutureEverything and Studio NAND. Data art commission for London 2012 festival and the Cultural Olympiad.
3. The games Social media response :) :( Sentiment analysis and classification x #goldmedal #hockey Real time data visualization Data sculpture Data journalism
4. Sentiment analysis @barack_obama +1 +1 +3 (provided by lexalytics salience engine) Congrats to Michael Phelps for breaking the all–time Olympic record. You’ve made your country proud. —bo
5. emoto2012.org https:/ /vimeo.com/46615102
9. Phelps Phelps Phelps Bolt Hockey Soccer these are crap -->
11. HOCKEY HOCKEY HOCKEY HOCKEY HOCKEY HOCKEY A) shortest cathethus aligned to hypothenuse swapping position alternately B) shortest cathethus aligned to hypothenuse swapping position alternately mirroring after 4th element B) shortest cathethus aligned to hypothenuse swapping position alternately mirroring alternately
14. emoto2012.org Implemented using: backbone.js d3.js html5 boilerplate — underscore/jquery/modernizr/...
17. emoto installation https://vimeo.com/49679699
20. What’s the story?
27. Olympics keywords 8b. Archival Flat files (Compressed) 9. Load Balancer / CDN Amazon Elastic Load Balancer & CloudFront 3. Message Bus Redis Queue Push/Writes Reads 5. Message Bus Redis Queue 7b. Stats & Replay Datastores Redis Key/Value 7a. Message Bus Redis Pub/Sub 4. Sentiment Analysis Lexalytics Salience Engine 2. Ingestion Cluster Receives & buffers 6. Statistics Analysis Topic Matching and Stats Aggregation 1. Twitter Streaming API 8a. Web Servers Nginx to serve client-side application Node.js server-side events API
28. Olympics keywords 3. Message Bus Redis Queue Message Bus Redis Queue 4. Sentiment Analysis Lexalytics Salience Engine 2. Ingestion Cluster Receives & buffers 1. Twitter Streaming API
29. 8b. Archival Flat files (Compressed) 5. Message Bus Redis Queue 7b. Stats & Replay Datastores Redis Key/Value 7a. Message Bus Redis Pub/Sub 6. Statistics Analysis Topic Matching and Stats Aggregation
30. 8b. Archival Flat files (Compressed) 9. Load Balancer / CDN Amazon Elastic Load Balancer & CloudFront 7b. Stats & Replay Datastores Redis Key/Value 7a. Message Bus Redis Pub/Sub 8a. Web Servers Nginx to serve client-side application Node.js server-side events API
31. Zooming out a bit…
32. The world’s response to the games?
34. emoto2012.org blog.emoto2012.org Thanks for your attention!