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Measuring the Christmas spirit

How much do you like Christmas? Do you look forward to it all year or is it just an irritating inconvenience that comes round again far too quickly? This year we thought we’d try and measure how people feel about Christmas. An obvious choice was to use Twitter, a tool that we use everyday and that has grown enormously in popularity worldwide this year.

How it works

We’ve written a programme that continually searches Twitter, and looks for any tweets containing the word “Christmas”. When we hit the jackpot, the tweet is fed into one end of our sausage machine algorithm, which magically spits out a rating, or score, for each tweet.

The ratings are based on the other words found in the tweet. We compare these words to prepared lists and weightings charts so that not only can we decide if a tweet is positive, negative or neutral overall, but we can gauge the severity of the emotion behind it.

All the ratings are aggregated and used to update our web page’s bar chart at set intervals. As each update comes in we also revise our daily “spirit level”, and this is shown, using Arduino, on our ‘spirit-o-meter’ needle that you can see via a webcam.

The very best and worst of Christmas?

To make things a little more fun, we’ve roped in a few Redweb volunteers, in fact we have just the right amount to fill up an advent calendar. At the end of each day they’ll either have to eat a Ferrero Rocher or a Brussel sprout. It all depends on that day’s Christmas spirit, good or bad. Whatever the outcome however, we’ll be taking a photo and adding it to the page to keep a record of December’s progress.

Here’s the link to our Christmas spirit web page and make sure you follow us on Twitter and become a part of it.

We hope you have a very happy Christmas!

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