What is #SOTU2014?
#SOTU2014 is an interactive project which analyzes the State of the Union speech in 2014 using hashtag data from Twitter. The project has three main features: a popularity over time graph, a engagement by location map, and the actual speech (broken into one-minute segments). The project allows users to see what parts of the State of the Union speech caused the most engagement, what topics that engagement converted, and what areas of the country were most engaged. The photo below shows the website and how it works. you can see the highlighted portion of the speech, the one minute segment on the graph above and the engagement map. Click on the image to play around on the actual site!
Sources
I identified three sources that are critical to this project’s success: Twitter hashtag data, Twitter Tweet location data, and the speech itself. On their own, the sources provide a significant amount of information but lack enough context to draw conclusions other than what is supplied by the source. Together, these sources make the project special and allow viewers to draw more meaningful conclusions.
Processes
How was this project made? Twitter has an API, which anyone can connect to after they get approved for a developer account. With this API you can collect the same data #SOTU2014 did and create your own cool projects. After collecting data from Twitter, the developer displayed the data with graphs and maps.
Other interesting Twitter projects:
Here is a crypto trading bot that makes trades based on Twitter data!
Or, here is an NYC train tracker that allows users to track the status of their train without (funny enough) checking MTA’s Twitter feed.
Presentation
The presentation of this project is “restrictingly simple”, which makes it effective and easy to decipher. The user can only interact with three things: the speech, the map, and the timeline. If the user is interested in a certain paragraph in the speech they can read through the speech and find that part! If the user wants to see how engaged their state was during a segment of the speech, the user can hover over their state on the interactive map. If the user is interested in the part of the speech where Twitter was most engaged they can click the timeline. That’s all! The presentation of this project makes it easy to draw conclusions about the speech after one or two scrolls through the site.
Discusison Questions
Does the site make an argument? If so, what?
Although not explicitly stated I believe this site makes an argument that Twitter engagement data can be useful. Social media receives a lot of hate (some of it well deserved) but this project shows us that if we stop paying attention to what each individual Tweet says and instead aggregate everyone’s opinions we can find meaning. The project certainly gives us a new perspective on the SOTU speech but at the same time they are showing us how valuable, interesting, and detailed data from social media can be.
Who is the target audience? (i.e. specialists? a broader public?)
I think the target audience is the general public, hence why it is a website and not a classified government research paper. However I think the project is more valuable to specialists than it is to the broader public. Imagine the president and their speechwriters combing over this data to see what words, phrases, tone of voice, and even hand gestures provoked certain reactions from the public. They would certainly use this data to make future speeches more effective.
Additional Questions
I wonder how the data change if we changed the timeframe of speech segments? Instead of 1 minute segments how about 30 second? 5 minute? It would be especially interesting to see what individual words invoked what reactions from Twitter.
#SOTU2014 is an inspiring project. It uses a unique dataset in a fun way and helps us and speechwriters analyze speeches in a new way.
