Emotional state of Brighton captured through social media data

The companies are producing ‘Mind of the city’ – a mood barometer for Brighton, which uses technology called Emotable to gauge how people really feel about the city.

The technology monitors emotional language used in social media as it happens. Emotable is an emotional text processing engine, which looks for emotional language used in social media posts, tags it and then categorises it into one of the following core emotional groups: joy/happiness/love, sadness, fear/worry, anger/hatred and excitement/surprise.

Sam Zindel, data strategist at iCrossing said: “When it comes to social media, people are happy to talk very openly about their experiences. So what better way to understand how people genuinely feel about a city at any given moment than to monitor live tweets? With this project we hope to shine a light on the real mood of Brighton, be it happy, sad, scared, angry or surprised.”

The project, which runs throughout September, will analyse around 350,000 tweets about Brighton for emotional content.

It is part of a wider initiative called ‘Imagine Brighton’ which will unlock the value held in open data. By capturing and analysing data from sources including transport, health, crime, education, the environment and local economy, Imagine Brighton aims to help Brighton and Hove with smarter decision-making, accelerating innovation and generating economic growth in the city.