Tilburg University Twitter dashboard continuously measures political mood in EU
Marketing Analytics students at Tilburg University have designed a Twitter dashboard that measures data on the European elections and visualizes them in real time. It shows, for example, that LGBT rights is a trending topic in Poland, while migration is commanding a great deal of attention in Italy and Bulgaria. After the elections, the students can use the data for graduation projects.
The Twitter dashboard, that is available on electionstats.eu, is refreshed every fifteen minutes. Election Stats keeps track of what is being communicated on Twitter in all European languages using some 800 relevant hashtags, user names of political parties and politicians, and keywords relating to political topics.
The idea for the dashboard came from students following their Research in Social Media course and was realized under the supervision of Andrea Domenico Antonacci. Lecturer Dr. Hannes Datta saw the potential: “With a project like this, students can gain a lot of useful experience in collecting and analyzing large amounts of data. It also helps them to obtain direct entrepreneurial experience.”
Moreover, everyone in Europe can follow the political mood live on Twitter. The approach that the students initially had in mind was to measure how polarization is developing in the EU, but other subjects were also incorporated into the dashboard.
Note to editors
For more information on Election Stats, please contact the Tilburg University press office at tel. +31 13 466 4000 / persvoorlichters@tilburguniversity.edu.