How Rugby Moved the Mood of New Zealand

Authors

  • Paul J. Bracewell DOT loves data Wellington, New Zealand
  • Timothy S. McNamara DOT loves data Wellington, New Zealand
  • Wynton E. Moore DOT loves data Wellington, New Zealand

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.12922/jshp.v4i4.93

Keywords:

sentiment, intervention analysis, rugby union

Abstract

A method for quantifying the collective mood of New Zealanders using mainstream online news content and comments is outlined.  Mood is quantified using a text mining pipeline built with the Natural Language Toolkit (Bird, 2009) in Python to measure the sentiment of articles and comments.  Intervention analysis is applied to identify statistically significant events which cause a permanent shift in the quantified mood.  This technique builds on the well-known ARIMA models, and has been successfully applied in finance to understand the reaction of stock markets to external events. 

     This two-step process shows the impact of the mood of New Zealanders after their national team, the All Blacks, won the 2015 Rugby World Cup.  We find that the All Blacks victory over Australia had a statistically significant, positive impact on the overall mood of New Zealanders.

Author Biographies

  • Paul J. Bracewell, DOT loves data Wellington, New Zealand
    Founding Director, Chief Data & Analytics Officer
  • Timothy S. McNamara, DOT loves data Wellington, New Zealand
    Data Engineer
  • Wynton E. Moore, DOT loves data Wellington, New Zealand
    Data Scientist

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Published

2017-01-01

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 4 (2016): Journal of Sport and Human Performance

Section

Original Research Articles

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