I ran some analysis on about 330,000 tweets having to do with people going to see/having seen The Avengers. In case you’ve been completely deprived of any sort of media recently, it’s a superhero movie.
Some might say “The Superhero Movie”, but, not having seen it myself yet, I’m not in a position to judge.
I created query topics to look for each of the main characters as well as the actor behind that character.
The following is the table of how each of them did – as you can see, The Hulk was the most popular out of all of the superheroes. He did, indeed, “smash”.
Here are the top themes overall from the tweets:
This actually does a good job of showing why I wanted to create query topics for the superheroes. Many of their names come out looking more like themes than like proper “names”. Many of these themes aren’t particularly useful, so, I excluded a bunch of them when I was doing other sorts of analysis.
Next, I decided to see what themes were most commonly associated with each of said superheroes. As I said before, I pulled out things like “watching avengers” when I was doing this analysis, as it adds nothing in terms of what people were associating with this character/actor.
Starting from the top….
- The “bad ass” award clearly goes to The Hulk, with a #2 place for Iron Man.
- Captain America clearly had an awkward moment.
- “Always angry” goes to the green guy.
- Interesting that Loki just barely edged out The Hulk for bad guy.
- Iron Man, hitting the pipe again. (Well, this actually came from a tweet that was floating around asserting “Robert Downey, Jr. started smoking marijuana at the age of 6”. If I were to be really rigorous about this analysis, I would separate the characters from the actors. But, I’m not going for statistical rigor here.)
- Black Widow gets the best outfit award
- And the “sexy ass” award goes to Thor
Remember, themes are exact noun phrases that are present in the content. Were I to want to spend more time on the analysis, I’d probably set up some more classifiers and start grouping themes into buckets. But, this quick and easy way allows me to get a feel for what people are saying.
I’ve also decided to start delving into hashtags. Here’s the top hashtags for the movie:
Nope, not much interesting there. I am going to be doing more research around hashtags, as there’s clearly some more and less useful ways to use them. None of the crosstab stuff I did with hashtags and sentiment/characters revealed anything interesting.
Speaking of sentiment – where’s the sentiment reports? Well, there wasn’t a lot of interesting sentiment. It was largely positive, with a bit of misclassified negative sentiment due to creative use of profanity.
There you have it. The Avengers, as according to Twitter.