Twitter reveals where is happiest about Christmas

Researchers at The University of Manchester have identified Doncaster as being the most positive city in the UK about Christmas, whilst Oxford is the most negative.

Marco Smolla and Jamie Soul, from the Faculty of Life Sciences, captured and analysed 3 million tweets with the word Christmas or Xmas in to listen in on what the nation is saying about the festive season.

Some of the most common words that came up were love, shopping, decorations, presents and Santa. But there were also some more unexpected ones, such as harrystyles and ill.

The pair then scored the tweets as happy or sad based on the words in the text and ranked cities.

The top 5 most negative were:

1. Oxford (12.9% of tweets were negative)
2. Southampton (12.6%)
3. Newcastle upon Tyne (11.3%)
4. Birmingham (11.2%)
5. Liverpool (11.1%)

The top 5 most positive were:

1. Doncaster (70.3% of tweets were positive)
2. Dukinfield (55.7%)
3. Sunderland (54.2%)
4. Nottingham (52.8%)
5. Leeds (51.2%)

Examples of some of the negative tweets include:

“Absolute Heartbreak! To lose is one thing but to lose it in the 90th min from a counter attack is an absolute disgrace! Christmas ruined!” said a Twitter user in Scarborough.

“X Factor is Christmas number one...blah blah blah music is dead and Christmas number 1 is meaningless now etc etc etc.” said another person in Huddersfield.

Jamie says: “Whilst we had great fun carrying out this exercise the results help to illustrate the use of bioinformatics techniques for analysing complex, big data. These skills are used every day by thousands of researchers to help understand human disease.”

Marco adds: “The programming language that we use is helping researchers around the world to make sense of the immense amount of data that has been collected over the past few years. Statistical analysis is now an important part in our fight against disease.”

Notes for editors

Tweets were captured worldwide between 16:00 and 19:00 on Sunday 21 December. The full table of cities ranked in order of the most negative to the least is below:

City	Number of tweets	Positive	Negative	Positive %	Negative %
Oxford	594	248	77	41.75084175	12.96296296
Southampton	609	271	77	44.49917898	12.64367816
Newcastle upon Tyne	1672	694	189	41.50717703	11.30382775
Birmingham	2408	1133	271	47.05149502	11.25415282
Liverpool	2430	1062	272	43.7037037	11.19341564
Bristol	1385	679	154	49.02527076	11.11913357
Cambridge	731	372	81	50.88919289	11.08071135
Leicester	631	318	69	50.39619651	10.93502377
Kingston upon Hull	1513	649	165	42.89491077	10.90548579
Glasgow	1894	843	205	44.50897571	10.82365364
Manchester	4298	1951	460	45.39320614	10.7026524
Edinburgh	1318	571	136	43.323217	10.31866464
Leeds	1414	725	145	51.27298444	10.25459689
Brighton	838	403	85	48.09069212	10.14319809
Sheffield	1144	527	116	46.06643357	10.13986014
London	17082	8116	1726	47.51200094	10.10420325
Sunderland	531	288	53	54.23728814	9.981167608
Cardiff	1221	559	117	45.78214578	9.582309582
Norwich	749	347	69	46.32843792	9.212283044
Belfast	759	360	69	47.43083004	9.090909091
Nottingham	1094	578	92	52.83363803	8.409506399
Coventry	705	286	59	40.56737589	8.368794326
Dukinfield	1132	631	80	55.74204947	7.067137809
Doncaster	633	445	34	70.30015798	5.371248025

A word cloud of the most common words is available from the press office.

For more information please contact:

Morwenna Grills
Media Relations Officer
Faculty of Life Sciences
The University of Manchester

Tel: 0161 275 2111
Mob: 07920 087466
Email: Morwenna.Grills@manchester.ac.uk