This article is a result of a collaborative data visualization project with my classmate, Jaina Gandhi to fulfil the coursework requirement of INST 760 at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Social media platforms have lately become a popular source for understanding public sentiment due to the freedom of expression they offer. A lot of textual analysis and research has been done on publicly available Twitter data to understand sentiments, networks, user engagement etc. since tweets are a genuine source of public expression. But how often do people consider analyzing emojis used in these tweets to understand popular sentiment?

According to statistics cited by Ad Week, 92% of the online population uses emojis.

Twitter reports that since 2014 alone, over 110 billion emojis have been tweeted. This profusion of emojis is an unexplored treasure that can tell us a lot of stories and insights.

Being a fan of Game of Thrones, the popular TV show was an obvious choice of topic for my emoji analysis. My classmate and I decided to create a visualization tool that explores millions of emojis from tweets related to the hashtag #GameOfThrones on Twitter. An emoji cloud speaks more than a word cloud and it is appealing, fun-loving while providing a clear picture.

We collected data from over the last four seasons to build an interactive visualization tool using D3.js, a JavaScript visualization library. The tool gave us lots of interesting stories that reveal public opinions on Game Of Thrones characters.

So what did we find?

#game-of-thrones #emoji #twitter-analysis #design #data-visualization #data analysis