A SCOTS student has created amazing artwork using social media data from 35 million tweets collected around the General Election in May.

Stephen Fitzpatrick gathered information on tweets, breaking them down into different emotions and translating them through a data analysis tool into his colourful designs.

The 27-year-old, of Denny, Stirlingshire, who graduated with a BA in Art and Design and won the Most Promising Student in Creative Industries at Forth Valley College, worked with Stirling-based emotional data analysis company Elumini to develop complex algorithms.


The data was plugged into a data visualisation tool called Gephi, which allowed him to see the patterns and networks that were being created with what people were saying and how they were feeling.

He then looked at the eight main emotions using the colours assigned to each one by psychologist Robert Plutchik in 1980.

Fitzpatrick said: “The formation of the graph is dictated by how people were feeling.

“During the research, we found Labour was scoring very high on every emotion even in things like anticipation and anger, the negative emotions, because they took a hammering left, right and centre. They were even scoring high on the positive emotions like joy, because when I was digging a bit further into it, it was a quite a sinister joy because they were feeling quite happy that Labour lost the election or happy they didn’t get into power.”

He said: “Elumini gathered all the tweets based on the May elections, they were scanned for key hashtag words relating to emotion like anger or joy, then we plugged the data into this Gephi analysis tool".

Former bricklayer Stephen, who now works for Art is an Option in Alloa, also used this innovative technique for a project in the final year of his degree, which helped him graduate with flying colours and win the top prize for his department.