Sentiment Map Rendering
ESRI is the 800 pound gorilla in the world of maps. Back when I worked for an equally weighty analytics software vendor, I was deeply jealous that a competitor had a partnership with ESRI, while my company partnered with – how shall I put this – a lesser mapping vendor. Our maps stunk, while ESRI’s maps were functional and cool.
Now, through my text analytics work with LinguaSys, I have the good fortune to partner with ESRI to bring text analytics and mapping together. ESRI’s Mansour Raad has been creating functional and cool geographic visualizations of sentiment, and he’s bringing them to the world. Next week he’ll be speaking at ESRI Developer Summit, inspiring fellow developers with a new example that we created – a visual study of sentiment toward the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
So often sentiment analysis ends up as a simple pie or bar chart – what percent like my brand, what percent hate it? That type of analysis doesn’t give the client any basis for action. Instead, imagine putting open-ended comments – from surveys, social media, service requests, and other sources – on a map. And enhancing the data with analytics – not limited to simple positive/negative, but with subtleties such as whether the writer is using indicators of disapproval or emotion, obscenities or even references to Nazism. Imagine using color, interactive behavior and other indicators to visualize and identify meaningful patterns in the data. It’s pretty, but it’s more than pretty. Done right, this kind of visualization enables decision makers to derive actionable information.
Read more about Mansour Raad’s work in his post, Enter the Fifth Dimension; Sentiment Map Rendering
Date: March 23, 2012
