We set out to weigh more than 800,000 tweets on topics related to the revolution so we could present our analysis here from three different perspectives:a First, how sentiment evolved in response to unfolding events; how the most influential tweeters and popular tweets shed light on the most influential Twitter users and what types of tweets reverberated most strongly; and how user sentiment and follower relationships relate in terms of dynamic social network characteristics and sentiment. Using these metrics, we compared Egypt-related topics during the revolution to other popular early-2011 trending topics (such as politics, sports, and entertainment) (see the sidebar “Pulse of a Revolution”).

 

a http://www.pulseofthetweeters.com

evolving emotion

To get a sense of how Twitter activity reflected the events of the revolution, we selected six Egypt-related topics that trended at least three days during the period January 25–February 11, 2011, where a trending topic was a subject identified by Twitter that notably increased how much it was discussed. 5 We also selected topics that trended several times to see how conversations developed in response to the events of the revolution.

We collected thousands to hun-
dreds of thousands of tweets for each
day Egypt-related topics were trending
and assessed the sentiment of daily
tweets. We classified the sentiment
for each tweet as positive, negative, or
neutral based on a sentiment-analysis
technique described by Zhang et al. 6 As
Twitter does not require users provide
their geographical location, we were
unable to isolate the tweets coming
from within Egypt itself.