An algorithm for measuring relative anger at Eskom during load-shedding using Twitter

Eskom is the primary provider of electricity in South Africa. On November 1, 2014, Eskom reported that a coal silo collapsed at its newest power station, Majuba Power Station. The damage at the power station forced Eskom to implement rolling blackouts (called load-shedding) throughout the country. This load-shedding continued into the Christmas season. People flocked to social media to comment about the load-shedding and Eskom in general. The original research project described in this paper was to attempt to map the load-shedding by monitoring Twitter. This was not successful due to the lack of good geolocation data coming from Twitter and was abandoned. The research project was modified to be an attempt at analysing the sentiment of posts about Eskom on Twitter. This was also abandoned because the majority of the posts were negative. There were no positive posts. The final modification to the research project (and the one reported in this paper) is to measure or quantify the relative anger at Eskom in two different tweets. It is important to note that this paper is not about the quality of the electricity supply. It is about measuring people's emotional perception of that supply.