India at Rio Olympics 2016: The winners are not always the most loved ones; the social media analysis says so!
By : Flytxt R&D Team
Post the mega event Rio Olympics 2016, Flytxt data science team did an analysis using Facebook and Twitter pages specific to India at the Rio Olympics 2016. The attempt was to find answers to some of the following questions.
Who among the Indian athletes hit the popularity chart? Whose popularity took a dip? What was the sentiment among the Indian junta? Which sporting events gained maximum attention?
Analysis was carried out with data collected before the event (5th August) and data after the games (21st August).This was followed by filtering and tokenization. The process includes sentences being converted to words and removal of irrelevant stop words.
The number of occurrences was the criteria to find the popular item (such as sportsperson or event) in the games. The sentiment analysis comprised use of a dictionary of over 4000 words that included positive and negative terms.
In this article, top 100 items have been visualized as word clouds.
Dipa Karmakar outscored even the medal winner in terms of popularity
Before the event, P.V Sindhu was ranked low in terms of expectations behind Saina. Sakshi was not even mentioned as a medal aspirant. Shooters as expected were the most expected ones to win medal. However post event the popularity chart totally swung, popularity of medal winners as expected soared, but the one who surprised everyone and became an overnight star is young gymnast Dipa Karmakar.
Most mentioned female athletes:
- Badminton Player PV Sindhu
- Wrestler Sakshi Malik
- Gymnast Dipa Karmakar
- Badminton Player Saina Nehwal
- Archer Deepika Kumari
- Tennis Player Sania Mirza
- Wrestler Vinesh Phogat
Most mentioned male athletes:
- Shooter Jitu Rai
- Archer Atanu Das
- Boxer Vikas Krishan Yadav
- Wrestler Narsingh Pancham Yadav
- Boxer Manoj Kumar
- Shooter Gagan Narang
- Badminton Player Srikanth Kidambi
Most mentioned Indian athletes post Olympics
Female athletes earned an overall more positive sentiment compared to male athletes
Most positive sentiment in tweets prevailed for PV Sindhu (27.5 %), Dipa Karmakar (17.5 %) and Sakshi Malik (12.5 %) followed by Saina Nehwal (6.3 %), Atanu Das (6 %) and Jitu Rai (5.5 %).
Words that typically invoked positive sentiment included proud, congratulation, champion, support and great
By looking at the results of the analysis, the Indians associated following adjectives to athletes.
- The spectacular PV Sindhu
- The brilliant Sakshi Malik
- The talented Dipa Karmakar
- The amazing Saina Nehwal
- The fabulous Atanu Das
Though a medal was won in wrestling, it is yet to catch fire among Indians
Hockey kept its popularity intact with Indian team giving a much improved performance, even beating the ultimate gold medal winners, Argentina. Though badminton surged ahead of Tennis and shooting, wrestling is yet to move ahead in popularity chart.