Sewage sh*tstorm: How does Twitter feel about rivers?

Our rivers had a busy autumn on Twitter as the hashtag #SewageScandal trended in the run-up to the parliamentary vote on the Environment Bill. Some were surprised by this sudden spike in social media engagement with sewage pollution. But many people have been using the Twitter platform to speak out against pollution or indeed to celebrate their local rivers.

Thames21 teamed up with Oxford University to explore how we can harness big data analytics to understand how people engage online with their local rivers. This is part of its wider project to use twitter data to monitor the public perception of London’s rivers.

We are now proud to present the prototype of a web app that links social media sentiment with river quality.  Having analysed over 3 million tweets posted over the last 15 years, we learned how more than 450 individual water bodies in the Thames basin provoke positive or negative sentiment. And we display our findings on an interactive online map that invites you to explore how people feel about the rivers in your catchment.

Please join us for a preview of the river sentiment map on Friday 17 December at 12-1 pm! Just email helge.peters@ouce.ox.ac.uk to receive your link for the webinar.