Over the past two weeks, news around Steve Jobs—his death, his funeral, tributes—have dominated the web-sphere. Twitter was the place where many immediately went to share quotes, links to online memorials, commercials, cartoons and photos from years past, and to comment about anything and everything related to Jobs.
We thought it would be interesting to take a sample of the tweets over a 12-day period and use our semantic software, in this case, the Cogito Search Explore Engine, to further explore and filter the tweets and see what patterns, people and trends emerged in the data. The benefit of Cogito SEE is that applies semantic technology to the data for automatic text comprehension, and it is able to attack data from different angles, not just quantitatively.
(A significant number of tweets related to Steve Jobs centered around his creations and related brands.)
Using filters and different visualization features, we were able to look at the material through various lenses. Filtering the tweets by Places, People and Organizations and using a subject-action-object (SAO) analysis to better understand the roles of words used to form the tweets gave us different levels of detail about the tweets.
Using the Conceptual Maps feature allowed exploration of these categories, and provided a unique view into all of the people, places, organizations and concepts being discussed.
(The concept map for Silicon Valley highlights concepts, people, organizations and places for further exploration.)
On a personal note, I never met Steve Jobs, but his products are what piqued my interest in computers when I was about 12 years old, and you could say that I indirectly followed him throughout my adult life. It is strange, but I, and many from my generation, are missing him already.
“Here’s to the crazy ones.”
To see our full analysis of the Steve Jobs tweets, click here to access our report.
Author: Luca Scagliarini
