This article is a result of a collaborative Data Visualization project with my classmate, Jaina Gandhi to fulfil the coursework requirement of INST 760 at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Social media platforms have lately become a popular source for understanding public sentiment due to the freedom of expression they offer. A lot of textual analysis and research has been done on publicly available Twitter data to understand sentiments, networks, user engagement etc. since tweets are a genuine source of public expression. But how often do people consider analyzing emojis used in these tweets to understand popular sentiment?
According to statistics cited by Ad Week, 92% of the online population uses emojis.
Twitter reports that since 2014 alone, over 110 billion emojis have been tweeted. This profusion of emojis is an unexplored treasure that can tell us a lot of stories and insights.
Being a fan of Game of Thrones, the popular TV show was an obvious choice of topic for my emoji analysis. My classmate and I decided to create a visualization tool that explores millions of emojis from tweets related to the hashtag #GameOfThrones on Twitter. An emoji cloud speaks more than a word cloud and it is appealing, fun-loving while providing a clear picture.
We collected data from over the last four seasons to build an interactive visualization tool using D3.js, a JavaScript visualization library. The tool gave us lots of interesting stories that reveal public opinions on Game Of Thrones characters.
So what did we find?

1. Overall top public sentiment suggests high engagement

For a show with dragons, snow zombies, and snow dragons crafted in high-res graphics, it is not a surprise that people are obsessed with dragons 🐉 . The overall dominating emojis 😱 , 😭 denote shock and despair while 👏 👌 and 🙌 denote that users are enjoying the show. So the overall top sentiment suggests that the show is very engaging to the audience. Also, it looks like "A song of ice and fire" has more fire🔥 in it than ice.
2. Jon’s death is tragic and heartbreaking

Jon Snow is the most frequently discussed GoT character on Twitter and we have a lot of sentiment data to analyze. His emoji cloud is dominated by despair and shock 😭 , 😱 , and 😢 which our analyses say, primarily tweeted during the Season 5 finale where Jon Snow is stabbed to death.
Also, the dominating fire 🔥 emoji tells us how the reveal of Jon Snow’s original name and his Targaryen background became highly popular among the fans on Twitter.
Another interesting find is that occurrence of a correlation between a character and completely unrelated emoji could often happen. In Jon Snow’s emoji cloud, we find a pizza 🍕 showing up due to multiple reasons such as Domino’s pizza advertising Jon’s favourite pizza or people tweeting that they are eating a pizza during a GoT marathon.
3. Fans are in awe of Arya and are encouraging of her actions

Arya’s emoji cloud is particularly dominated by emojis of encouragement and strength such as 🙌 , 👏 , 💪 , and 👌 . Her dire wolf 🐺 and her sword Needle 🗡 are suggestive of her strong character.
4. Hodor’s death was grieved while Joffrey’s death was celebrated

A comparison of emoji clouds for Hodor and Joffrey shows how fans can love or hate the fictitious characters in fantasy worlds. All the emojis suggesting grief and heartbreak were used in the tweets relating Hodor’s death whereas emojis suggesting party and celebration were used in tweets pertaining to Joffrey’s death.
5. People mocked Sam’s misery

Samwell Tarley’s emoji cloud has a unique emoji – 💩 the pile of poo. He suddenly became famous on Twitter after the revolting scene of him toiling away at the Citadel, trapped in a prosaic routine of cleaning bedpans, stacking books and serving soup.
6. Spoiler alerts usually involve Jon and Daenerys

Although irrelevant to the characters, emojis like "red alert" often pop up in the context of spoiler alerts. Across all the emoji clouds, the alert emoji is seen only in the particular case of the relationship between Jon and Daenerys, indicating that most spoiler alerts revolve around this pair.
7. Tears do not always mean sad. Happy tears are a thing too!

Jon and Sansa’s relationship shows a strikingly dominating crying face 😭 in the emoji cloud and we wondered why. Turns out, people had happy tears on their reunion after five long seasons of suffering.
The design process behind this visualization
The goal was to create a data story that demonstrates public sentiments through emojis. We went through a series of Brainstorming sessions and performed analysis through Affinity Diagramming before creating Concept sketches. Then we created a low fidelity functional prototype to receive feedback for further iterations.


Design decisions
- Clicking the faces trigger the emoji cloud and it reshuffles to show the emojis that were used with that character in the tweets.
- Emojis resize based on their occurrences. Bigger emojis showing a stronger connection with the character informs about the dominant public sentiments.
- Clickable links between faces are a clear representation of the connection between two characters. Links are interactive and clicking on them restructures emoji cloud to show emojis used with both the characters in a single tweet.
We achieved our Design goal to make the TweetCloud a straightforward, captivating and user-friendly storytelling tool. Faces and emojis create a visually appealing story and interesting insights from a character’s role can be learned from the visualization. This design can be extrapolated to visualize any other datasets such as trending movies or other TV shows to catch the interesting stories and details in a glimpse.