A Descriptive Analysis of Twitter Activity in Spanish around Boston Terror Attacks

Abstract

On April 16, 2013 two bombs detonated in the Boston Marathon, with the dramatic result of three people killed and more than 180 people injured. The strong social impact that this event produced in the public opinion has been impressed on the social networks that stored opinions, comments, analysis, pictures and other materials. The availability of this large amount of information and computational capability to process it, provides a new way to study social behaviors. In particular, understanding the social network responses to the Boston terror attack can give us some clues to understand its impact on the society. Among the social networks available on Internet, Twitter, given its open nature, provides amazing research opportunities. This paper presents our first step building a Twitter analysis tool in Spanish. We illustrate this approach introducing a description of the activity generated on Twitter around the sentence “Maratón de Boston” (which means “Boston Marathon” in Spanish) along one week after the terror attack. This result will be used to implement a sentiment analysis tool in Spanish. During the observed time frame we have observed little social iteration and a high number of retweets in the Spanish-speaker twitter community.