A web-based platform for monitoring, structuring and visualizing the online response to Rio 2016 Olympic Games on Twitter
The version 1.0 followed the beta version. At this stage we were more familiar with the Twitter interface and also aware of the different online responses to the Olympic Games.
We have broaden our observation lenses in two directions. First, we diversified our sources of tweets. We expanded the official category by gathering tweets from another 25 users accounts. At the same time started to collect tweets to what we called critical category. This category was based on a exploratory identification of hashtags that opposed the Olympic Games. We were also interested in the stream of data concerning the Olympic torch relay - which we collected and classified as torch category - so we designed a visualisation experiment to give expression to this particular event. Finally, two other tweet search queries were created in other to highlight different aspects of the olympic debate. Brasil category - which was later discontinued - gathered tweets from mainstream and alternative media focusing on national political and economic news. The Rio2016 category collected any tweet that mentioned the #Rio2016 hashtag and became the main data source in terms of volume.
The broader and more heterogeneous approach at this stage leaded us to our second strategic decision: include a temporal dimension. The visualizations here trie to show a dynamic and dialetic conceptualisation of the opinion and images shared about Rio 2016 Olympics Games.
Our inclination towards a pluralistic view of the online response to the Olympic led the brand design of OBSERVATÓR!O2016. The stylized combination of the two letter O is, at the same time, the abbreviation of Olympic Observatory and the metaphor of observations lenses. The colorful and fragmentary fill texture represents our interest in investigating the Olympic theme from a multi perspective approach.
These are OBSERVATÓR!O2016 main page and visualization pages as they looked like in version 1.0.:
Home with OBSERVATÓR!O2016 new brand design and some custom CSS and JS applied upon the latest version.
Tweets organized and visualized by temporal and categorical handlers. Hashtags, user mentions and links are hyperlinks.
Images organized and visualized by temporal and categorical handlers. Clicking on the image to enlarge it.
The evolution and counterpoint of some of the hashtags that represents the official and critical view of Rio-2016
A collage experience that reveals impressions of the Olympic torch relay through a combination of texts and images.
Emotional patterns in tweets mentioning the following hashtags: #rio2016, #olympics, #jo2016 and #RoadToRio.