Analysing Twitter sentiment surrounding the Japanese earthquake

Yesterday I performed a quick and dirty analysis of the Twitter sentiment during the Japanese and Hawaii tsunami. Although it wasn't very thorough, it certainly highlighted some interesting trends in the sentiment (the peaks and troughs).

This time around I've spent some more time analysing the Twitter sentiment from yesterday, and I've also gone and analysed the sentiment from today as well. The hope is that by comparing the two days, some insights can be made into the data.

Average sentiment per minute

The following graphs show the average sentiment on Twitter regarding the earthquake on a per minute basis. The timescales aren't identical, but it's interesting to see how stable the sentiment seems to be on Saturday, compared to Friday (the day of the earthquake). Also, notice how on both days the sentiment is trending upwards, meaning that both days ended happier than they begun.

Twitter sentiment surrounding the Japanese earthquake - Fri 11th March 2011

Twitter sentiment surrounding the Japanese earthquake - Sat 12th March 2011

Average sentiment per hour

In these graphs I lowered the resolution of the data and grabbed the same average sentiment, just this time across each hour instead of each minute. The peaks and troughs aren't so profound this time, but you can still see quite obvious differences between Friday and Saturday. One of the most noticeable differences is that Friday (the day of the earthquake) is much more unstable, perhaps as news spreads, aftershocks occur, and the tsunami travels across the pacific.

Twitter sentiment surrounding the Japanese earthquake - Fri 11th March 2011

Twitter sentiment surrounding the Japanese earthquake - Sat 12th March 2011

Taking this further

I hope to take this analysis a step further and dig a little deeper into the peaks and troughs. I'd like to tie in key events in the timeline of the disaster to see if they match up with dramatic changes in sentiment on Twitter.