Update: It's taken nearly an entire day for sentiment to return to "expected" levels and patterns, and that's not to say that the community has moved on from this news. Far from it. There really haven't been many events that I've seen to have such a dramatic and long-lasting effect on the Twitter community, and it's still happening this very moment. For those who are interested, I've updated the graph below to show a more recent look at sentiment across the day within the UK.
As part of my ongoing research into Twitter sentiment I've always been interested in seeing how people on Twitter react to national and global events. Steve Jobs' recent passing is exactly one kind of these events and has, in my opinion, unsurprisingly triggered one of the largest and most instant changes in sentiment that I've ever seen on Twitter.
In the graph below you can see Twitter sentiment within the UK during the past 60 minutes (top), past 24 hours (middle), and past 7 days (incomplete at the bottom). I think it's quite obvious when something weird happens to the sentiment, but I needed to be sure. After conducting a little research I found out that news about Steve's death broke at around half past midnight in the UK. This timing coincides nearly exactly with the sudden and massive drop in sentiment, which I can only assume means that the two events are connected.
I'm continuing to gather data and I'll be very interested to see how sentiment changes throughout the day as the world wakes up to this sad news.
Transmissions Received
Aaron
I Rob, been following your sentiment experiment for a while now… I would LOVE to be able to do the same thing, are you able to explain a little more how you did it?
Also looking at the news and the sudden drop in sentiment, are you able to set-up any alert/warning system when sentiment drops? If you are would it be feasible to at that point search for common keywords between all the tweets (keywords that you don’t use for sentiment tracking) and maybe pick out what is causing the sentiment spike? You could then post the news automatically maybe?
Josh
Very interesting study, but as far as I am aware you guys are the last to awake and hear the news.
Mr Anonymous
Rob, no offence but I find what you’re doing to be disrespectful. On Twitter, the first thing you did this morning was to ask about what time he died so that you can quickly knock up this post, not an R.I.P. message or saying how sad it was. It’s like you’re playing on people’s emotions and trying to get link-bait for your fairly unscientific project. I just hope it’s due to a lack of emotional intelligence rather than a desire to get hits for this.
Colin
Couldn’t disagree with the above comment from “Mr Anonymous” more.
What would Steve Jobs want - trite/pointless RIP messages or for someone to expand what we understand about the world and to share that knowledge?
Rob Hawkes
@Mr Anonymous: I’m sorry to hear that you feel that way, but I can assure you that my intentions are not to play with peoples emotions and get as many hits as I possibly can. Have you considered that posting this is my way of paying my respects to Steve? I don’t do R.I.P. messages and in my opinion this is a great way to show the huge impact Steve had on so many people.
Also, I asked the time the news was announced so I could be sure that my findings were accurate. I’m honestly surprised that you think so little of me. I could have made my first post “OMG, STEVE IS DEAD!” but I think the rest of the world covered that one for me.
Finally, you can’t start with “no offence” when you’re clearly trying to belittle my research, question my motives, and take a cheap shot at my emotional intelligence.
Ben Everard
I don’t find it disrespectful, it seems like a great way to commemorate that fact that we have these technologies, in an industry so heavily affected by Steve Jobs.
Jem
I hope our motives in life are not judged by everyone on the basis of how/when we tweet RIP messages, because if so that’s a whole lot of deaths I’ve got to catch up on.
I find this fascinating, even as someone who has been quoted as having anti-Apple sentiment before. Don’t stop doing what you’re doing, Rob.
Aaron
Woah @Mr Anonymous… Chill out…
I actually wrote a rant back but decided to refresh the page before posting to see what everyone else put… Stop getting so wound up about it, if you want to say how you feel then post it to rememberingsteve@apple.com
Rob’s work is great and he is doing exactly what everyone else should be doing, reflecting on what an impact this great man had on everyone’s life.
@Rob, keep up the great work mate ;-)
Mr Anonymous
Analysing people’s RIP tweets on Twitter isn’t a fitting or appropriate tribute to Steve Jobs. How does this work help anyone?
Nick Smith
@Mr Anonymous, Rob is clearly working hard on something he believes in - understanding public sentiment. Surely there’s no better tribute than that?
This is a really interesting case study Rob; to what extent do you feel the drop in sentiment is down to people simply tweeting more about this than anything else?
Rob Hawkes
@Mr Anonymous: I think you misunderstand my research. I’m not directly targeting messages related to Steve’s death here, I’m merely visualising overall sentiment on Twitter on an ongoing basis.
The fact that I posted about sentiment surrounding Steve today is only because I wanted to highlight the dramatic effect he had on the online community. I genuinely think that others will find this interesting, which seems to be the case on the whole. My study is in no way looking at Steve in particular, or even death and mourning. However, I know studies that do focus on death and online mourning and the findings are extremely useful in the areas of psychology and use of social media.
I’ve been doing this for months and the findings from other similar studies and my own are valuable in a multitude of ways. For example, some studies are finding links between Twitter sentiment and the stock market. People have used the data from that study and have actually profited from it as a result of knowing in advance when the market will rise and fall.
If it helps, please stop looking at this post as a continuation of my research and think of it as a tribute to just how many people Steve touched in his life. The fact that one man can cause such a dramatic effect across the world is truly inspiring.
Jack Franklin
I also think it says something, Mr Anonymous, that you’re not willing to leave your actual name.
Ryan
@Anonymous, there is nothing wrong in what Rob has done here. Its only a reiteration of the genius of the man we all knew as Steve Jobs and the impact he has had on our world.
At least we have the technology today that people all around the globe can learn about the loss of such a genius. So many great minds of the past silently passed away until the world came to know about it a few days later. Moreover, they did not even have the worldwide exposure that Steve had.
Steve wasn’t the man who made the internet. Nevertheless he is the man who through his sheer insight drew a far greater percent of population towards technology than anyone else had ever done before. And we are not talking about geeks here. We are talking about men, women and children from all walks of life who embraced the internet owing to the devices he helped think up.
It is only fair, that the whole world appreciates this genius, and mourns his loss.
Your work is greatly appreciated Rob.
Hannah Wolfe
Emotions are running high today, and I can understand that some people don’t feel this to be appropriate, perhaps it’s a little soon to see such a deeply sad event depicted in such a (literally) black and white way.
Personally though, I think it’s fantastic. Sentiment measures people’s feelings, their mood, the tone of their interactions with others. What this shows is that the general mood of the entire country is pretty depressed today. Everyone is sad to have lost such a great man.
We can laugh and joke around how the sentiment changes during holidays, the Royal wedding and stupid TV shows like X Factor, but this is different.
The change in sentiment today is not like those changes. It wasn’t a little change, and it hasn’t bounced back. Steve’s effect on people is profound and that should be both lauded and respected.
Dutchcloggie
Interesting experiment. Can you explain a little more about how you measure ‘sentiment’? Is it how many times certain ‘sad’ words are used? I am not sure how you measure this.
Cheryl
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
@nursieC
Stacy Vlasits
Nothing to take seriously in what Mr. Anonymous has written. Typical internet troll.
While I respect that Rob wants to pay tribute to Steve Jobs, there’s certainly nothing obligatory about him doing so. I’d still find Rob’s work interesting even if he had a less humane attitude toward his subject. Celebrities aren’t your friends and they aren’t your neighbors and analyzing twitter sentiment related to a celebrity’s death certainly isn’t akin to maligning the dead.
In sum: neat project, Rob.
Daniel Tomlinson
@Rob I congratulate you for this project, Steve himself would have been proud if you think about it, at the end of the day he did what he believed in no matter what anybody said, had been knocked down several times along the way.
Rich Boakes
Mr Anonymous asked: “How does this work help anyone?”.
It’s a fair question as it’s probably not an obvious answer.
The software was an undergraduate research project. Too often in day-to-day live we don’t get an extended opportunity to be innovative. Undergrad projects are often works of true invention, both in what they achieve and how it’s accomplished. Occurring (usually) in the final year of an honours degree, the student is afforded time and supervision in creating a technically challenging artefact of their choosing. They must then report (with academic rigour) on what they create: evaluating the capabilities and failings of their progeny.
I’ll suggest therefore that the primary purpose of this project was to provide Rob with an opportunity to research computational linguistics and natural language processing, and to produce a piece of work that would earn him the best grade he could achieve. So that’s how it’s helped one person.
It’s also helped another person (a student of mine) who’s currently commencing a project with significant technology overlap. Even if Rob doesn’t release any code, his academic report is out there and can be used, accelerating the learning process of the next person. That’s how science works, we build on the work of those before, a little at a time. The impact of a piece of research may only be measurable weeks, months or years later, but it can often be traced because assumptions and references are all clearly recorded. Also, many students don’t get around to electronically publishing their work, so the easy availability of this piece is to Rob’s credit. The work will help many people, directly and indirectly.
Spin forward several months from Rob’s project deadline and project is completed. However, unlike far too many other undergrad projects, this has not been mothballed and continues to produce results. This is extremely valuable. With Twitter sentiment analysis we’re asking a machine to make a judgement on the homogenised emotional state of all humans. So running the system longer provides more opportunity for insight into whether the evaluation and conclusions were correct. There are very few globally significant events where there will be an easily-measurable noteworthy change in human opinion. Such events, like the death of Steve Jobs, provide an opportunity to re-evaluate the accuracy of these systems, and re-consider our interpretation of them. Twitter data is live and full of human sentiment, so why berate the live analysis of such material?
Kevin
Fascinating! I’d love to know how you’re measuring this stuff.
Steve was a tinkerer, an innovator and visionary - I think he’d appreciate that his death is contributing significantly to this sort of research.
walter biscardi
It’s always interesting to see how social media responds to events. We’ve seen the power of social media to literally change the course of democracy. And now you’ve shown us analytically how the world responded to what can truly be called the end of an era.
I’m sure Steve Jobs would appreciate this type of research, especially if you did your work on a Mac. :) Nicely done and thanks!
Chris More
Rob,
Interesting data and I have been interested in twitter sediment for a number of years now. A few years ago I created an application called “TwitterSphere” but I let it go after it was filling up my server with public timeline data.
I also recently wrote a blog post about how Amy Winehouse’s death drove search traffic to my website:
http://web.chrismore.com/2011/08/how-tragic-celebrity-death-increased-my.html
I don’t blog that often so I don’t generate a lot of traffic anymore thus I didn’t attract any negative comment. Not for one minute do I think your blogs, tweets, or research are disrespectful or selfishly trying to generate web traffic.
So….how about some HTML5 projects for our Mozilla Snippets project? :)
-cmore
Chris Leary
Unrelated, but I wanted to let you know that you don’t seem to have an author field in your syndication feed, so it’s unclear who’s writing in aggregated feeds like Planet Mozilla.
Otherwise, thanks for the interesting data!
Tymon Sturgeon
Interesting Study. Will you be doing anything like this for the response to Google’s new language: Dart?
Tidy Design
Nice post and awesome blog… Mr Jobs will be missed :(