Twitter Faces

Does social networks have emotions? For this project, I would like to experiment and try to put a face and extract expressions from Tweets around the world. The idea is to get a decent amount of recent tweets around the center of a big city, for example New York, do a basic sentiment analysis and extract an average mood of the people posting. The application will run in real time and I will query for new tweets every 5 or 10 minutes, this way I could create a lively face, that constantly changes mood and expressions. I think it will be really interesting to see the overall mood of people in a certain city, are they happy when there is a big event coming up, or are they sad, if something bad has happend. For the moment, I will use a really basic sentiment analysis, using only dictionaries with positive and negative words, but along the way, I could switch to a more complex method, if I find something suitable for real time processing.

Here is just a quick sketch I did in Illustrator, just to show how the application might look. The idea is that the face and expression changes will be animated, so we could get that lively feel. Also, I could list the most mentioned positive or negative words.

I will probably implement the app in Openframeworks, but I am also thinking about doing an online version, probably using Processing.js

Any comments are welcomed!