24 hours tweeting state union

Tweeting the State of the Union

There was lots of speculation about what would or should be covered in the president's first state of the union address, but there was only one breaking news alert, of minor importance, from The Washington Post. Nevertheless, the state of the union address is too important to miss. So January 27, 2010 I started searching for twitter messages.

Search term: I started looking for search terms that would specify that the messages were about the state of the union address. The obvious was #SOTU. An alternative was "state union." But I was also looking at the messages streaming in real time. It was clear that most of the messages found by searching for Obama were about the state of the union address, but most used neither #SOTU nor state union. They were assuming the 'moment.' So I searched for Obama.

Search Term: obama

Justification: Since I was searching for Obama what justification is there for believing they were all about or inspired by the state of the union address? A pretty straightforward justification can be found in the distribution of messages provided by Trendistic.

The messages about Obama the evening of the 27th reached 4% of the total twitter messages. A figure for the month gives even further evidence of how unusual this was.

The average number of tweets per day mentioning Obama before January 27 was 0.32%. The messages on the 27th reached 4% or more than 12 times as many. Even if one were to subtract out the standard number of tweets you would still have a huge spike of messages on the day of the address which were surely inspired by the address.

One more bit of evidence -- once into the speech all of the trending subjects on Twitter were about the address.

Search: I began searching in the middle of the day on January 27. The first search produced 1500 messages, and the first tweet was at 10:10 a.m. I stopped searching at 10:10 a.m. on January 28. So the search lasted 24 hours.

A total of 81,639 tweets were found. Those that included SOTU numbered 11068, and those with state as a part of the message numbered 14,219. If I had searched for either or both only about one-third of the messages about the state of the union would have been found.

The xml file created by Archivist is obama-sotu.xml and the .txt file that can be read by Excel is obama-sotu.txt. These are freely available for academic uses -- research and instruction.