The island of freedom: What emotions do Sziget’s guests spread through Twitter?

Sziget, which is held every year on one of the Budapest’s islands, is one of the largest music festivals in Europe. Since 1993 people from different parts of Europe visit this event for good music and unforgettable atmosphere of freedom. Is this festival still giving positive emotions, or it has become just a well-known spot?

To reveal this I decided to analyze recent tweets with the hashtag ‘sziget’. Which emotions do people feel while writing about the festival?

To begin with, we should stress out that positive emotions in tweets prevail negative:

The next bar chart depicts which emotions (positive/negative) do citizens of different countries share with their friends more/less frequently. Generally, we can see that people from the UK and Hungary write the biggest amount of negative-emotion tweets. However, citizens of the UK also also show the highest figure of positive emotions in their tweets. This probably means that users from this country were presented better in the Twitter on the day when data had been retrieved. To back up this statement, we can look at my previous research, which clearly shows that the biggest amount of tweets was from the UK.

If we want to look closer at links between pos/neg emotions in tweets and users’ countries of origin, we can turn to the next two bar charts that show more detailed picture: 

Positive emotions - Countries

Negative emotions - Countries

I  was interested about the content of ‘negative’ tweets. As the result, the next chart shows text of tweets with negative emotions. We can see that verb ‘miss’ is the most widespread within them, which means that even the so-called ‘negative’ tweets concerning sziget are not negative about the festival.

Turning to the next chart, we can see that tweets with positive emotions were retweeted more frequently.

The last table shows the link between pos/neg tweets and their source. We can see that the highest number of positive posts is from Tumblr, while the highest number of negative – from both Twitter for iPhone and Twitter Web Client.

To conclude, we can say that generally people spread positive emotions with the hashtag ‘sziget’. Furthermore, these ‘positive’ tweets are retweeted more frequently. However, if we turn to the content of ‘negative’ tweets, we can see that they are not negative about the festival at all. Backing up on the countries of users’ origin, we can claim that the highest number of positive emotions are spread by the UK’s citizens, while the highest number of negative were spread by people from both UK and Hungary.