Plexus: An Interactive Visualization Tool for Analyzing Public Emotions from Twitter Data
This tool addresses the need for researchers to analyze real-time public emotions from social media, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for data mining and visualization.
The authors tackled the problem of analyzing public emotions from Twitter data by developing an interactive visualization tool that identifies and visualizes emotions on related topics, with effectiveness demonstrated in a feasibility study involving 14 participants.
Social media is often used by researchers as an approach to obtaining real-time data on people's activities and thoughts. Twitter, as one of the most popular social networking services nowadays, provides copious information streams on various topics and events. Mining and analyzing Tweets enable us to find public reactions and emotions to activities or objects. This paper presents an interactive visualization tool that identifies and visualizes people's emotions on any two related topics by streaming and processing data from Twitter. The effectiveness of this visualization was evaluated and demonstrated by a feasibility study with 14 participants.