Blurrt

Last 7 days in British Politics

July 3, 2014 — by

Blurrt is tracking tweets mentioning the main political parties in the run up to the UK General Election in May 2015. Due to the nature of the traditional lexicon, pulling relevant tweets mentioning the words “labour” and “conservative” in the context of British politics is a challenge. Less so for Liberal Democrats, and UKIP which is an unique key word.

Labour, as a word, can have many open compound workings e.g. slave labour, labour costs, labour practices, labour market, hard labour, labour force, forced labour etc. So we create a boolean search to remove tweets that mention labour which are irrelevant to our purposes.

After a week of testing, Blurrt has pulled through 150k tweets mentioning “Labour” and “Lab”, and even with the boolean filter, it is apparent that a huge proportion of the tweets collected are irrelevant. To counter this, we have removed “Labour” and “Lab” from the search terms and just have:

@UKLabour, #Labour -(#oneborn, oneborn, born, baby, labor, again, costs, practices, market, hard, rights, force, forced, slave), #Lab -(#oneborn, oneborn, born, baby, labor, again, costs, practices, market, hard, rights, force, forced, slave), Ed Milliband, @Ed_Milliband, #milliband, #votelabour

After this action, the number of tweets are reduced to 10.87k – this would suggest that a lot of noise has now been filtered out. People are going to tweet using just the term “Labour” rather than “#Labour” but we would prefer to collect less data that is relevant than pollute it with data that is irrelevant.

To treat the politics parties equally, we are not collecting tweets mentioning “Conservatives” either but have used the search terms:

@Conservatives, #Conservatives, Tories, #Tories, David Cameron @David_Cameron, #cameron, #votetory

There is always going to be a margin of error which we are in the process of working out the exact percentage. In this case, there will be people tweeting #conservatives or #labour in the context of American or Australian politics for example.

Whilst we are reviewing and working on fine tuning our collection of relevant tweets, here is the latest data collected from Twitter for the Conservatives, Labour Party and UKIP in the last 7 days.

Gen election Blurrt Score 2014-07-03 14.10.44

Gen Election Ave sent 2014-07-03 14.16.47 Conservatives

Gen Elec Tory Donut 2014-07-03 14.17.45

Labour

Gen Elec Lab donut 2014-07-03 14.18.47

UKIP

Gen Elec UKIP donut 2014-07-03 14.19.39