I’ve done some visualisations of voting patterns in Birmingham at the 2014 council elections. Head over to The Data Mine to see the full set, and if you want to leave comments, put them here, as the company website doesn’t allow commenting!
Visualisation of Voting in Birmingham Council Elections 2014
See more details on each ward and party on The Data Mine. Comments welcome below…
So far, I’ve recorded 4395 tweets mentioning “TEDxBrum” or “MarkingTheMap”. Here’s what they said…
Or if you prefer a black background:
Again, thanks to Wordle!
I’m doing Twitter analysis for TEDxBrum 2013. There have been some amazing speakers so far and more to come. Here’s a Wordle showing what people on Twitter have been discussing up until lunch. Click for a bigger view…
Here’s some quick sketch of Twitter traffic for TEDxBrum this morning.
There have been about 1100 tweets between midnight this morning and the first break. I’ve had to scale down #TEDxBrum & #MarkingTheMap so they fit, otherwise they’d be 5 or 6 times the width of the page. Click for a bigger image.
Here’s a map of the Twitter users who have tweeted about TEDxBrum up until the first break. I haven’t had time to analyse the clusters yet, but I see some technology people in the yellow group, social and political in red. Any other interpretations
Here’s another map of about 90 of the 300 attendees, using twitter handles supplied at registration and some quite clear cluster appearing:
TED & TEDx are brilliant events with high quality speakers talking about interesting things. If you haven’t checked them out before, have a look at the TEDxBrum and TED websites.
Last year I mapped the social network impact of TEDxBrum. My work in this area has advanced with various private mapping projects as well as public ones such as the Birmingham Food Scene Map, so I thought it was worth re-visiting TEDxBrum, particularly as the theme this year is maps.
So, here’s what I call a “Twitter Map Portrait” of @TEDxBrum. It shows the interconnections between followers of @TEDxBrum and also allocates them into “communities” based on who else they follow.
Followers of TEDxBrum. Colours indicate different communities. Size indicates how well followed an account is by other TEDxBrum followers. Click the image for a larger view or download the PDF for maximum zoom-ability.
We can see that TEDxBrum’s followers break down into several different communities, lets have a closer look and see if we can figure out what they represent. Comments on this are most welcome, particularly if you identify communities or themes I’ve not spotted, or if you disagree with my categories.
Let start with the section of the Yellow Group at the top left:
TEDx… community (zoom of top left corner of map)
As we can see, there is a distinct TEDx… community at the top left. Accounts here follow each other, but don’t follow other Birmingham based accounts.
Other accounts in the Yellow Group. Click for a larger image.
The rest of the Yellow Group is a bit of a catch all, consisting of accounts who also follow celebrities and big name accounts. That isn’t to say it’s their only interest, just that it’s what they have in common. There may be other communities lurking here which I haven’t spotted. If you have any other theories about this group, please leave a comment!
To my mind, technology and innovation seem to be the main themes here, with accounts such as Digital Birmingham, Birmingham Social Media Cafe, Innovation Bham Campus (at Birmingham Science Park Aston ) and Nick Holzherr. There are also some social media “stars” at the lower end of the group (Dave Harte, Karen Strunks, Jon Bounds etc.)
This group seems to break down into at-least three sub-groups, which we could identify automatically if required. To my eye, they seem to be Birmingham Business – Concerned with business in the city such as Business Birmingham, Birmingham Chamber of Commerce and also Ed James (Bham Publicity Association/ Bham Press Club / Heart FM Breakfast); Food – Cafes, bars and other accounts which also appear in my map of Birmingham Food Scene; City- Accounts with a strong local focus like Birmingham Live, I Am Birmingham, Outer Circle Bus and My Jewellery Quarter (who also feature in my analysis of the first TEDxBrum event).
The arts is big in Birmingham, so it’s no surprise to see such a large arts-related group. I’m also considering creating a Birmingham Arts Scene map, and it would be interesting to compare prominence of accounts between the two. Prominent accounts include mac (or as I still call it, “The Midland’s Arts Centre”), Custard Factory, Ikon Gallery, as well as Cy(ber) Birmingham (also prominent in my food scene map).
Local Political Accounts such as Politics in Brum and Claire Spencer and Bham City Council and Social Conscience / Social Action such as Birmingham Friends of the Earth , Nick Booth (@podnosh), Be Birmingham, and Louise Teboul. Also present are some core TEDxBrum Accounts such as Anneka Deva (TEDxBrum Curator) and Imandeep Kaur (TEDxBrum Outreach Co-ordinator)
TEDxBrum has a wide network, focussed on Birmingham, with representation from a number of key areas. It would be interesting to identify local communities that haven’t plugged in to TEDxBrum yet, for example, is there a local medical community on Twitter?
I’d be very interested to hear your comments on the groups identified and any other aspects, either via twitter @AndyPryke (follow me for more similar investigations) or in the comments section below. A Birmingham Music Scene and Arts Scene map are currently planned, I’d be interested in your ideas for future maps, and, of course, I’m available for commercial work in the area too (which comes with a lot more detail) and I’m happy to chat about any type of data, analysis or visualisation.
Look forward to seeing you at TEDxBrum on the 8th of June!
You are welcome to reproduce these images as long as you reference either @AndyPryke or include a link to this blog post. I’d love to hear if you do. Mapping Birmingham’s Food Scene by Andy Pryke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. 
Aston
Starting with a list of about a dozen twitter accounts in Birmingham’s Food Scene, supplied by our friends @PopUpDosa, we identify who is most interested in the scene, then look at who else they follow in order to map the scene more fully. This results in some very interesting maps with potential marketing implications for those involved.
The “seed” accounts were: @DigbethDiner, @themeatshack, @popupdosa, @smokeandumami, @ysl807, @SoulFoodProject, @brewdogbirm, @stirchleywines, @birminghamcubed, @TheWhiskyMiss, @yummy_brummie, @changekitchen
There’s a bit of a bias towards street food and savoury food, so I’d be interested to hear how I could extend the list, for example by adding @Suhaav.
Using our “seed list” of about a dozen food related accounts from Birmingham, we identified 133 individuals, businesses or organisations with a very high interest in Birmingham’s Food Scene. They range from the media side, such as Edible Brum Magazine (@EdibleBrum) and restaurant critic Paul Fulford (@PaulFulford), to baker and food evangelist Tom Baker (@loafonline), to blogger and man about town (well, I see him at many events) Cy(ber) Birmingham (@cybrum), plus many more.
Click each image to see a larger version, or you can see all the details in this PDFs – which you can also search for names!
This map shows the accounts which follow at least 10 of the “seeds”. They represent people and organisations with a keen interest in Birmingham’s Food Scene. Click for a bigger image, or you can see more detail in this PDF
Next we look at who else these “highly interested” accounts follow…
This shows an unfiltered view of accounts most likely to be followed by our “Highly Interested” group. Click for a bigger image or see full details in a pdf.
I’ve coloured the accounts using a clustering method, which uses information on who follows who to automatically divided them into three groups: red, green and blue. The red group at the top left contains many accounts which are generally related to Birmingham, but not so related to food. The other two groups are mainly food related, and you can spot features such as the cluster of hotels, pubs and city centre venues at the bottom left (in green) and accounts related to Stirchley at the top in Blue.
As we’re interested in the Food Scene, I’m going to cut out most of the red group. I’ll save a handful of “red” accounts which I know to be food related:
Four food related accounts hand picked from the “red” group. We’ll keep these accounts in the analysis
Why are these accounts in the red group (and, for that matter, why are accounts like “Created in Birmingham” in the blue)? Some examples which might help explain: Dr Birgit Kehrer runs @changekitchen which has strong voluntary sector links, this has pulled the account over into the red group. Similarly, @edibleeastside , “An arts led initiative to transform a derelict site into a vibrant and contemporary urban garden…” has strong arts scene links. Note, that this doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have stong food scene links, though this could be investigated separately. Depending on how these accounts want to position themselves, they may want to build more links with Birmingham’s Food Scene.
Another answer is that there is no perfect clustering, there are lots of ways to categorise accounts, and the automated process won’t necessarily agree with one individual’s view. However, I think you’ll agree it’s done pretty well!
Dropping the majority of accounts in the “red” group, we re-organise and re-cluster the accounts specifically related to food. Let’s have a look. Click for a bigger image, or for a perfectly scalable one, which will look lovely when printed, download the pdf.
Birmingham’s Food Scene Mapped. Click for more details, or see it all in a zoomable format (pdf).
So… what does this tell us about Birmingham’s Food Scene on Twitter?
Well, it looks like we’ve identified many of the key players. If we want to publicise something to the “scene” we’d do well to talk to those who are most followed (largest nodes). There are a number of other “Social Network Analysis metrics” which more accurately identify influence, and when I run these, accounts such as Claire Tortise (@FredaPR_consult), a specialist food/drink communications consultancy, stand out more clearly.
There’s quite a high degree of geographical clustering, for example, Stirchley accounts can be seen in the top left with many Kings Heath nodes close by and Moseley nodes towards the bottom left. Extrapolating from the Twitter evidence, we could contend that in Brum, many people are “hyper-locally” guided in their food choices, which is a fancy way of saying they want to eat somewhere close by.
Noticeably distance from other Moseley nodes is Carters of Moseley (@cartersmoseley) which is placed adjacent to another “fine dining” account, that of Glynn Purnell (@yummy_brummie). Which seems sensible. We could interpret this as “people interested in fine dining are willing to travel”.
I’d be very interested in hearing your comments and interpretation of this map, either via twitter @AndyPryke (follow me for more similar investigations) or in the comments section below. I’m also open to suggestions for other sectors to map, and, of course, I’m available for commercial work in the area too (which comes with a lot more detail).
You are welcome to reproduce these images as long as you reference either @AndyPryke or include a link to this blog post. I’d love to hear if you do. Mapping Birmingham’s Food Scene by Andy Pryke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
My recent talk at the Birmingham R User Meeting (BRUM) was on Big Data in R. Different people have different definitions of big data. For this talk, my definition of big data is:
“Data collections big enough to require you to change the way you store and process them.” - Andy Pryke
In the talk I discuss the factors which can limit the size of data analysed using R and a variety of ways to address these, including moving data structures out of RAM and onto disk; using in database processing / analytics and harnessing the power of Hadoop to allow massively parallel R.
Here’s the presentation slides: Big Data in R (SlideShare) or download in .pptx or .ppt format.
Please click pictures to see the high resolution versions
If you follow “@Conservative” on Twitter, who else are you likely to follow? Size is a measure of how much more likely an account is to be followed than we’d expect from its total number of followers. Click for a bigger version.
@Conservative followers with a deeper interest in politics tend to follow these accounts. Note the Labour Party node, reminding us that following @Conservatives (or @UKLabour) doesn’t necessarily make us a supporter. Click for a bigger version.
As always, Stephen Fry makes an appearance. We’ve tried to compensate for his general popularity (and that of other celebs) where we’d expect a lot of people to follow them anyway, irrespective of whether they follow @Conservative. Click for a bigger version.
The group out to the right are, appropriately, lost American “Conservatives”, followers of the Heritage Foundation and other US “Conservatives” such as Karl Rove and Glenn Beck Click for a bigger version
[One small warning – if you might be offended by some of the swear words or disrespectful phrases actually used on Twitter, please (i) don’t read further (ii) don’t complain! Some people can be quite rude. If you’re interested in finding out what people are actually saying, read on…]
N.B. It is likely that, due to limits/bugs in Twitter’s “geocode” parameter, the data used is biased towards the North of England and Scotland. We used Twitter’s “geocode” parameter to limit the search to the UK. There have been problems with this in the past, so the absolute tweet volumes above may not be reliable. We’ll need to run some experiments to try estimate the effective radius covered…
The first UK tweet in our sample [see below for methodology] relating to Margaret Thatcher’s death appeared at 11:48 on Monday the 8th of April 2013. @ThomasPrice182 wrote simply: “Sh*t thatcher is dead!!!” [I’ve *’d out some swear words in the text for the benefit of the search engines.]
Tweet volumes quickly grew over the next few hours and days from approximately 35 a day in the preceding 5 days to 44,000 on Wednesday the 9th.
Number of UK Labelled Tweets in Days Leading up to Margaret Thatcher’s Death (Note the spike from 11:48am on Monday)
Number of tweets in our sample from within the UK mentioning the word “Thatcher”.
The Wordle below given a visual overview of what people were tweeting on the day of Margaret Thatcher’s death:
Most common words in UK Tweets mentioning Thatcher on Monday 8th April. Click for a more detailed PDF version.
The top 3 words, “Thatcher”, “Margaret” and “#Thatcher” have been omitted, as they would dominate the picture. This leaves a top 5 most used words of “RIP”, “Dead”, “Died”, “Death”, “People”, which seems like it would be expected. Here’s the most popular tweets containing “RIP”
However, the next most tweeted word was “@Reverend_Makers“, the account of the band Reverend & The Makers who posted a number of more negative comments which were highly re-tweeted such as
Most common words in UK Tweets mentioning Thatcher on Tuesday 9th April. Click for a more detailed PDF version.
Again, very common words, this time including “Thatchers” were omitted. @Joey7Barton and @PiersMorgan are mentioned a lot, two of the most popular tweets being from @PiersMorgan:
These were in response to tweets from @Joey7Barton including these two
The “People” tweets include:
Most common words in UK Tweets mentioning Thatcher on Wednesday 10th April. Click for a more detailed PDF version.
By Wednesday, the Funeral was the big issue, and @frankieboyle was being heavily re-tweeted. The following tweets were the most re-tweeted ones containing the word “funeral”:
Most common words in UK Tweets mentioning Thatcher on Thursday 11th April. Click for a more detailed PDF version.
BBC QuestionTime overshadows other keywords on Thursday:
Most common words in UK Tweets mentioning Thatcher on Friday 12th April. Click for a more detailed PDF version.
The BBC and its position regarding the song “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” attracted much attention on Friday.
Approximately 300,000 tweets from the 3rd April 2013 to 13th April 2013, which mentioned the word “Thatcher” and were tagged by Twitter as being within 400 miles of the “UK Centre” of 54.6667N 2.7544E (Penrith Town Hall).
If time allows I may explore:
As I don’t work for Twitter, I can’t verify that I’ve included every UK based tweet mentioning Thatcher. Here’s a couple of things which could affect the results:
The Data Mine 