Ribbonline is a politically inspired data visualization project I developed in 2018. Its ambition was to understand how the growing tension in Spain’s northeastern region of Catalonia, which in 2017 and 2018 escalated into a bizarre symbolic war of ribbons and spray paint, translated into the online world.
I mined half a million tweets spanning over a year of activity, and measured how many of them included emoji known to convey support for either side of the polarized debate over Catalan independence. I plotted the tweets on an interactive timeline, which sits next to a 2000-word article explaining the chain of events.
Check out Ribbonline here.