You know that big Ferris wheel in England? It’s called the eye. It’s been a fixture on the London skyline since Y2K (run for the hills – build a Ferris wheel!). At night it features lights. Yeah, lights! Anyhoo, those lights are going to be taking the Twitter pulse of the Britains during the 2012 Olympic Games. Energy of the Nation will take the emotional sentiment of tweets about the Games and use the Ferris wheel’s lights to display results in a kind of pie chart.
A team from the University of Wolverhampton and some MIT grad students will cull tweets, filtering for location, keywords, and hashtags. All Things D writes:
Those results are distilled, creating the basis for the 24-minute light show displayed on the London Eye twice each evening. And if you aren’t there to watch the show yourself, there is of course an app to track the flow of positive and negative tweets around the U.K.
Revelers can witness the light show every night at 9:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. And if you can’t be there in person, you can track sentiments via an app. Like or dislike, the show is in your hands, Britain.
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
