It’s been a very busy month for Greece. Not in a particularly good way.
Inspired by Oliver Marsh’s talk (@SidewaysScience) at the Science in Public 2015 Conference, I pulled data from twitter feeds relating to Greece. After much trial and error, and discovering that you can only easily access data from about the last 9 days via the API (which I accessed directly through R).
To visualise this complex data, I have used wordclouds, coloured by emotions as classified by the sentiment package in R.
I picked four days:
- Tuesday June 30th: on this day, Greece missed an payment to the IMF. Banks had been closed on June 29th, after the referendum was announced and approved by the Greek parliament over the previous weekend. Capital controls are in place, with withdrawal limits of €60 in place.
- Monday July 6th: the immediate aftermath of the referendum that returned a decisive “OXI” (no) vote
- Monday July 13th: a deal is struck in Europe; the conditions harsher than those rejected in the referendum vote.
- Thursday July 16th: The Greek Parliament begins to approve measures as required by creditors; some violent protests in Greece that evening.
Tuesday June 30th:
Surprisingly, Angela Merkel and François Hollande actually featured more prominently than any Greek politicians on twitter on June 30th! This may be because their names are easier to spell, thus making spellings more consistent. This is one problem with standard text analysis: spelling mistakes are not accounted for unless a lot of prior data cleaning is undertaken.
Monday 6th July
The immediate reaction on twitter to the referendum results are a combination of surprise, disgust and fear. In the tweets in English, at the very least, did not contain much joy / jubliation after the No vote. Even at the time, it seems as those on twitter were very aware that a no vote wasn’t really going to help the Greek cause.
Monday 13th July
This day marked the realisation of the capitulation of the Greek government to the demands of the creditors. The third week of capital control in Greece continued.
Thursday 16th July
The disgust both relating to the violent protests and towards the imposition, against the public vote, of the harsh conditions attached to the bailout, are evident in the twitter stream [over 90,000 tweets] on July 16th. The names of Greek politicians are more prominent here than on June 30th.
To be decided 