Visualization of the Public’s Opinion on Politically Influential Tweets

Abstract

We present a Twitter-based website The Political Grid Project that focuses on harnessing the potential of Twitter as a political medium. On this site, the general public can create new datasets additionally to existing Twitter data, and investigate the data through diverse visualizations. This site lists tweets posted by political entities, and a user votes on each tweet based on the two standards—how much she agrees with the idea expressed in the tweet, and how important it is to her. More importantly, our site provides users with various interactive visualizations that represent both individual and collective voting data accompanied by data accessed from Twitter APIs. While exploring the visualizations, users can closely examine various aspects of politics, including their political preferences, the ties among the voted entities based on the analysis of the collective data,and temporal or geographical patterns. Ultimately, we expect our users to reflect on the political issues in tweets that are otherwise ephemeral and to better understand candidates in upcoming elections. Furthermore, our site allows users to investigate the public’s aggregated opinion and their political stance among the public.