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Boston Officials Track, Analyze Tweets for 'Sentiment Analysis'

Every time a Twitter user mentions the city’s official account, @notifyboston, Boston collects information about the tweet and the user.

(TNS) -- Boston is using in-depth data about tweets and Twitter users who mention the city’s official account, @notifyboston, to track and analyze what Hub residents are talking about.

“It’s important to find out how many people contact our city — whether it’s through Facebook or through Twitter or through phone calls or through email, however it is — it’s important to keep at that information,” Mayor Martin J. Walsh said.

The city collects information including time, username and even precise location for some tweets, along with the text.

“We use Twitter like a lot of places do, to push information to people but importantly to listen to them,” said Lauren Lockwood, chief digital officer for Walsh. “We also look at sentiment analysis to try to figure out what’s happening out there and what people are saying and how people feel.”

That sentiment analysis, which identifies tweets as positive or negative — or somewhere in between — based on language, shows up directly in Walsh’s office.

The data the city collects is all public information, and is only from tweets that specifically mention @notifyboston. Still, the idea that there is a database filled with tweets and usernames could rub some the wrong way. The city has posted a year’s worth of information on its open data website.

“It’s great that they’re making the information publicly available,” said Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty program at the Massachusetts ACLU. “It would be a little bit creepy if they were doing it behind closed doors.”

The data also includes precise location for tweets with geocodes, which can pinpoint the location of a tweet.

“Certainly, if people don’t want their location shared, they shouldn’t have geotagging (turned on),” Lockwood said.

The city also uses the information to track real-time trends, such as this past winter when a number of people tweeted the city wondering if they should put out their trash cans, she said. That led to the city making an announcement about the trash schedule.

Said Lockwood: “It’s an incredible channel for just hearing what’s on people’s minds.”

Tweet tracker

Every time a Twitter user mentions the city’s official account, @notifyboston, Boston collects information about the tweet and the user. Here are some of the most interesting facts discovered by a Herald analysis of the data between March 1, 2014, and Feb. 28.

  • Between March 2014 and March 2015, @notifyboston was mentioned 45,053 times.
  • The most active minute during that time was Feb. 8, 2015, at 11:11 a.m., responding to the city announcing Boston Public Schools would be closed for two days because of the snow.
  • Accounts that mention @notifyboston have an average of 2,906 followers, but that number is likely skewed because of retweets @notifyboston receives from politicians and other government agencies.
  • Roughly half of the accounts included cities, and half of those listed Boston or neighborhoods in Boston. Cambridge, Somerville and Brookline also topped the list.
  • One user mentioned @notifyboston 283 times, the most for a single person’s account.
  • 41 percent of all tweets mentioning @notifyboston were sent during February.
©2015 the Boston Herald. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.