The Things for Which We are Thankful

Now properly stuffed with Quorn, potatoes and green beans, it is time to resume academic work. First, however, I wanted to share another Twitter-plus-Processing visualization by Canadian Jeff Clark.

On his web site Neoformix, Clark released a simple bar graph around midday on Thanksgiving. It scans the Twitter timeline for references to “thankful” and tallies up the words related to those tweets.

Twitter is thankful

The order and proportion of this list changed with each new tweet, but it didn’t take long for family and friends to rise to the top, followed later in the day by turkey (after people started to consume their American-sized portions of traditional fare). I took the top 40 from the list and did a little card sort—an occupational hazard in design—to come up with these groups:

• Those Close to Us—family, friends, wife, niece, girlfriend, son, friend
• Thanksgiving Day Activities—turkey, football, cooking, food, coffee
• The Global Village—everyone, world, everybody, doctors
• Wellness—life, health, heart, rest
• Metaphysics—god, love, hope, thoughts, forget, honestly
• Time & Place—time, work, morning, home, house, maine, place, away, job
• Expression—music, twitter, making, art
• Politics—obama

While our future President made the cut (#24, as the day winds down in the East), there is one notable exception: Rick Astley. Twitter lit up about an hour before Clark released his Thankful tool to acknowledge the Rick Roll at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. That will be hard to top. As Joe Wilkerson tweeted later:

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was RickRolled… by Rick Astley himself. And the announcer said “Rick Rolling Phenom”… Meme = Over.

Even if Clark’s bar graph had been around in time to pick that up, only a few people shared their appreciation in the form of tweets. Many more noticed, though.

Best. Thanksgiving. Ever.