AFL fan community sentiment: Are fans happy or sad?

This entry was posted by Laura on Sunday, 25 July, 2010 at

I generally don’t believe in sentiment analysis.  I tend to think it is junk because so much of automated sentiment analysis misses contextual clues, relying too heavily on keywords.  Sentiment analysis also tends to give sentiment to bot generated posts and to posts that are neutral.  Despite this, I thought it might be a bit interesting to try to do a sentiment analysis of the AFL fan community on Twitter.  Are they happy or are they sad?  And later, where are the happy fans and where are the sad fans?

The first step in doing that was to collect a whole bunch of AFL related tweets using searchtastic.  I’m currently up around 3,400 tweets. (When/If I do the geolocation version, I’ll provide the raw data set.)  The second step was to develop a list of AFL specific sentiment related words.  In my case, I’m just going with the characteristic of happy and sad to make this easier.  My sentiment keyword list is as follows:

Happy Sad
Best Worst
Win Spoon
happy lose
excited sucks
smile awful
star sackermanis
brownlo fired
medal suspended
victory fouled
club song sad
pride upset
won fail
congrats heartbreak
Purchased lost
lucky Sold
success Desperate
champions blow it
Fit blew it
Riewolt damn
glad avoid
legend unlucky
star failed
brilliant Akermanis
cruised slammed
hope injured
strained
medical
ugly
suspension
crisis
stumble
tribunal
poor
loss
wounded

The next step was to give a happy or sad label for tweets that included these terms. The last step was to count up how many Tweets were labeled Happy, Happy / Sad, Sad, No Sentiment.  I generated the following table:

Tweets % % – None
Happy 704 21% 55%
Happy / Sad 147 4% 11%
Sad 436 13% 34%
No Sentiment 2128 62%
Total 3415
Total 1287

Later, I’m hoping to match this sentiment with the geographic location of the tweets to find out where the pockets of AFL happiness are versus the pockets of AFL sadness are.

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  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/ANYPWFYQMNG7NRB55Q7C3PR6C4 Adelaide La Blanche-Dupont

    There are more “sad” words (10 more than “happy” words), and a greater variety of “sad” words too.

    And which Riewoldt? Jack or Nick? Both Riewoldts are making many of their fans – and others – very happy.

    Seems like the fans are happy for the moment.

    There are 1287 “sentimental” tweets.

  • http://www.fanhistory.com LauraH

    I was having difficultly thinking of happy and sad words. The sad list was easier. I read a few articles and most had those negative words in them so they were easier to pick out.

    Both Riewolts make people happy. :D

  • Leighblackall

    I like its simplicity… the last table confuses me a little, but I look fwd to seeing it in the map! What wsas the name of that fella famous on TED talk for programming visual data display on sentiment analysis..? Prolly good for the lit review..

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/ANYPWFYQMNG7NRB55Q7C3PR6C4 Adelaide La Blanche-Dupont

    The following are TED talks which cover a very wide net of the subject!

    In politics, David Cameron (2010) talked about using the next level of the Internet for citizen voting.

    And Tan Le talked about analysing your brainwaves: probably a different kind of sentiment analysis!

    Sebastian Wernicke did a talk called “Lies, damned lies and statistics”.

    Marian Bantjies talked about community-consensus art. Her work centres on typography and infographics (that's sentiment analysis too). She tries to evoke specific emotions like joy. She wants us to split our brains in half.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/ANYPWFYQMNG7NRB55Q7C3PR6C4 Adelaide La Blanche-Dupont

    And I understand that TEDxSydney and TEDxCanberra are very buzzing places/communities.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/ANYPWFYQMNG7NRB55Q7C3PR6C4 Adelaide La Blanche-Dupont

    Tell me if I'm shooting ducks in a barrel in the dark:

    Gavin Blake of FEVER PICTURE?

    tedxsydney.com/p/2010-in-graphic-nutshells

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