Visualisation chart maps Singapore election buzz online

Following yesterday’s post looking at the Singapore election and the use of both traditional media and social media, I came across this data visualisation showing the online buzz around the election.

The chart – which is available and updated live at this link – was put together by online analytics firm JamiQ and Swarm who tackled the visualisation and design aspects. Essentially it monitors mentions of the election online which are there plotted into the visualisation both as crude data, on the right hand side, and a visual set.

A full explanation of how to use the chart comes below – from Techgoondu – alongside this recent screenshot, though I urge you yo visit the live version here as the image below doesn’t do it justice (but  to enlarge click the graphic once – to get it its own window – and then click once more to see it in full size).

Quick walkthrough on how to read the chart

You can see all the key terms that have been trending since the 15th of April, and the left hand side of the visualization gives you an idea of how those terms change in time during this period.

If the term has improved in position from the prior day it will have green numbers, and if it has dropped in ranking from the previous day it will be in red. New ranking terms are in grey.

For example, you can see that PAP is one of the most discussed terms in the Singaporean social media space since the project was started.

On the right side are the top ranked news, blogs or tweets that have the biggest amount of viral spread, i.e. in this case measured by the number of retweets on twitter. Click on the source link to see the actual news/blog post/tweet and twitter link to see who has spread that post.

This data set is yet another potential method to measure the Facebook effect on the election and how it might affect the results. Without drawing early conclusions it is interesting to see that neither Nicole Seah or Tin Pei Ling rank in the trending terms… at time of writing at least. That could be an oversight on the data collection methodology, which is perhaps not ‘listening’ to enough sources on social networks or outside of the country’s tightly restricted online media, or it could simply be that both candidates social media buzz is a just small bubble within the overall coverage of the election.

Also of interest on the Singapore election is this nifty Google Maps mash-up which plots the electoral map for 2011 showing each seat’s contesting parties and their candidates.

On the subject of social media visualisation charts, I strongly recommend checking out Cascade which assesses the New York Times website and news sharing to demonstrate “How Information Propagates through Social Media”.

You’ll find the chart at this link while I’ve added a short overview below to give more details, but do visit the link.

Cascade is a 3D interactive visualization tool that reveals how information propagates through social media space by linking the browsing behavior on the NYTimes website with the corresponding social activity in terms of content and URL sharing.

In short, the tool aims to reveal the causal factors that determine how tweets about news stories are propagated in the most succesful ways. For instance, the visualization already can demonstrate how viral popularity is mostly influenced by the people who are followed by famous people, who in turn drive a lot of online discussions and retweet activity.

Plenty of food for data junkies out there.

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