Tweets analysed to power Olympic lights

Mike Thelwall, Professor of Information Science, within the Mathematics department was asked to lend his expertise to the project to create the stunning spectacle.

Professor Thelwall is one of the leading experts worldwide in infometrics- the science of measuring information to assess the importance of a set of documents, and Mike specialises in the newest area – measuring the value of web pages.

Every tweet is analysed for its sentiment, whether it’s positive, negative or neutral. These are then filtered through a computer program, which converts them into a light show using the London Eye.  The colours reflect the mood of people tweeting such as purple for negative, yellow for positive and green for neutral.

The shows use 24 hours of data and transforms it into a 24 minutes event which run every night during the Olympics and Paralympics, (see video)

Stage one of the Social Media Lightshow:

Mike has developed a specific related dictionary of 2,750 terms using a system he developed called SentiStrength, which can determine the positivity or negativity of tweets.

He said: “We saw big increases in both positivity and the amount of tweeting at every major event in the Olympics, Colton, the opening ceremony and the first UK gold. Jessica Ennis and Bradley Wiggins got particularly hugh levels of positivity. Overall, the Olympic tweeting was highly positive, with relatively little negativity, so the games seem to have been a huge success".


Mike's research team are also developing it so computers and even computer generated characters in virtual worlds can respond to human emotion.