On the Way to the Irish Parliament (Dáil Eireann): A Massive Data Analytics (Fun and LIVE!)

Finally Irish people are going to say their opinion in the general election tomorrow (#GE16). A large group of new voters are going to cast their vote tomorrow, and they are certainly excited for obvious reasons. Old voters are also excited as they received bags full of rebranded and brand-new promises; some of them are too good to be true. This year’s general election is special in many reasons; one of them is the massive online presence of both politicians and voters. And certainly the Data Scientists have taken an opportunity to take the general election of Ireland to the next level – they tried to understand the campaign and how it unfolds.

What an Emotion Around Fine Gael

One of the largest research institutes in Ireland, Insight Centre for Data Analytics has observed a large amount of data about the election. A team of researchers in the Insight4Elections project lead by Dr Derek Greene and Dr Georgiana Ifrim from Insight at University College Dublin and Dublin City University have unfolded the campaign using a large amount of online social media data (e.g., here.)

Sweet and Sour Around Fianna Fail

While they are doing great work regarding scientific analysis of the election, I took it as fun. Actually research is fun to me; there is nothing special about it. So, I tried to analyse the online social media data and show in a fun way, most importantly LIVE! Analysing a very large amount of data from online, and then presenting that is not a fun, technically speaking. My server crashed couple of times, and keeps doing so as number of request is increasing. So, I took some screenshots for interested readers.

Distribution of Emotion

I have found an interesting candidate in this election, Ciara Leonardi-Roche
with a twitter handle @CLR_AAA. While renowned politicians have thousands of followers and they also follow a lot of people. She has only 70 Tweets, she follows 43 entities, and she has 230.

If you are interested to play around the LIVE analysis, please visit my web lounge at www.mahmud.be/lounge/, and of course be patient, the server is not the best one for the job. Amount of data is big, so it may take some time. If it fails to show you something interesting? Try again later (after the election) :) And again, this is a work of fun, software was developed as a training purpose and no conclusion should be made from this analysis, it comes without any warranty and liability – and you know it!