Author: Tamara Atanasoska, Tech Ambassador

Together with IBM, we hosted a workshop to learn more about sentiment analysis. IBM obviously has an array of products that could lead us into many tech subjects, but for this workshop, we decided to look at Bluemix, and have Romeo Kienzler take us through "Sentiment Analysis on Twitter".

Sentiment analysis enables us to process huge amounts of data and extract valuable information from it, something that could take many, many hours to do manually. Sentiment analysis can also be called “opinion mining”, which is really important in everything we do, since we do everything for the users, and we want their opinion! Following trends, positive and negative spikes, knowing when to engage with users, benchmarking performance against the competition and so on. Twitter is fast and to the point - a perfect example.

Romeo started with a really thorough introduction to what "the cloud" actually is: getting us up to speed with service and deployment models, as well as architecture. We continued to look into NodeRed (check it out, if you want to save yourself some coding), and then proceeded to inspect data from the Twitter API, so we can use that with everything mentioned above to do the sentiment analysis. It was really fun!

There are multiple ways to do this, so check out these resources too: social data analysis without coding or sentiment analysis using Node.js, Express and ntwitter.

We are looking forward to many more workshops to come!