The world’s leaders right now are gathered at the climate summit in Copenhagen. DTU Informatics has constructed a barometer which continuously gauges the atmosphere around COP15.
Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen thinks that a common climate agreement is “within reach”, but what do people on twitter.com think?
Researchers at DTU Informatics have just finished a home page which performs real time research on all the tweets that continuously tick in at www.twitter.com.
At the home page http://rb.imm.dtu.dk/base all tweets containing the word COP15 are analyzed. All tweets are divided into two groups – one for the positive, and one for the negative tweets:
“When we summarize the result we will then have a barometer which tells us what people are thinking about the climate summit right here and now,” says Professor Lars Kai Hansen.
Both Lars Lykke Rasmussen and Barack Obama have a profile on Twitter, but also regular citizens use Twitter as a tool for communication. Since DTU’s barometer was established in the middle of November there have been around 25.000 tweets about COP15. Currently the barometer shows that a little over half of those tweeting are positive toward the summit.
The barometer counts feelings
The COP15 barometer has been fed with around 800 words which are either positively or negatively laden. If the computer for example encounters the sentence “COP15 is fantastic” it counts in the positive group – whereas the sentence “COP15 is a league of climate criminals” will go to in negative group.
Read more about the barometer on Jyllands Posten’s home page.