Saturday evening – at the theatre. It was the worst play I’ve ever seen. The room was half empty (which is .. rare, to say the least). A few people around me were dozing off. Meanwhile, I was counting sleeping people or analysing the beautiful decorations. I quit trying to figure out what all the metaphors in the play meant, all I wanted were some subtitles, to translate what the actors said into concrete facts and events.

Anyway, I then remembered that El Clasico (the match between Real Madrid and Barcelona) was just a couple of hours away. I started wondering what’s the impact of this sporting event on Twitter.

As soon as I got back home, I hacked some code to monitor a few Twitter keywords (“barcelona”, “real madrid”, “el clasico”, …) and then left it running.

Next day, I checked out the “harvest”. It collected over 3000 tweets over an interval of 3h30′, ranging from 3 to almost 100 tweets per minute. I plotted the histogram and highlighted the first and second half (with grey shading) and the 4 goals (with red lines).

The histogram highlights spikes in tweets at the beginning of the match, as well as in the end of each half. A little more interesting is the behaviour after a goal – a short drop (everybody stops to see the goal) followed by a spike (after checking the replays, people tweet about it).

Now let’s put some keywords on the chart. Get the most frequent words (I filtered for overall count > 25). Now compute each word’s count over 5 minute windows, plus the mean and standard deviation for these counts. Going over the counts again, I plot words with a window frequency a lot higher when compared to the mean (I used (freq – mean) / st_deviation > 3.5). I set the text opacity depending on the above score. Code is available here.

The words this algorithm found are pretty good. It found 2 of the goal scorers, another player with the decisive pass, some typical end-of-the-match words, as well as the occasional spam (one hour or a few minutes before the start). Possible improvement: Normalise frequencies for each window – will check it out in a future project.