X factor result show 6th December 2010

After last night's show there were huge numbers of tweets discussing the performances of the various contestants. We will present here a summary of our contextual analysis of all five contestants, and what this may mean for them in tonights results show.

To start with, we can look at how each contestant fared when analysed in context with winning words - i.e. which contestants, based on the twitter data, look most likely to win the public vote tonight?

Our analysis has the following ranking based solely on positive contextual analysis:

1. Cher
2. Rebecca
3. Matt
4. Mary
5. One direction

This result is particularly interesting.  One Direction have in the past always scored incredibly highly in our analysis, based on their demographic and how well it matches against the twitter demographic.  However, this time they are bottom alongside Mary.  It should be noted that Mary and One Direction scores are almost the same, with a clear gap to Matt and the others above them.

This would suggest that contrary to popular belief, that they may be in trouble in tonight's vote.  Mary also is in trouble looking at the scores, although she has been trending poorly for a number of weeks now.

We can also look at negative context, which means examining which contestants are talked about on Twitter as being who the public do not want to win.  This gives the following ranking:

1. Cher
2. Matt
3. Rebecca
4. One Direction
5. Mary

However, this ranking does not really tell the whole story.  The scores for each contestant are remarkably similar, and so there is not a clear difference between Cher ranked 1 and Mary ranked 5.  This is particularly worrying for Mary, since as we have seen previously she tends not to have as many tweets about her performance.  This would suggest that there is therefore a strong anti-Mary sentiment, when compared to Cher and the other performers.

Also, it would suggest that Cher is very much a contestant that you either love or hate, since she has finished top of both lists.  It is noticeable that Rebecca has moved down the negative context list, meaning that there are comparatively fewer people who dislike her performances when compared to the other contestants.

We can also look at examining the contextual analysis for individual contestants, such as Rebecca.  The figure below shows the analysis of the positive context for Rebecca.  Here we can see lots of positive context coming through, indicating that the majority of tweets were supportive of her performance.

As we can see, there are a number of positive words coming through such as: win, beautiful, amazing, best, grace.  If we look at the negative context for Rebecca then we can identify what issues people had with her performance.  The figure shows the negative context words closest to Rebecca.  The ~ symbol before each word indicates that to understand it, you should imagine a 'not' in front of each word.

Here we can see a number of words coming through, such as: ~dance.  This shows that there are a large number of tweets discussing the fact that Rebecca cannot dance, or does not dance, in her performances. Or perhaps, its because they think she's not suited to singing a dance song. We could create another context cloud for dance to reveal why and give more detail.  We can also see that not everyone likes her voice, as ~voice also comes up close in context.

We can undertake a similar analysis for Mary, where we can see the negative context analysis.

Here we can see that there is discussion about her not returning to Tesco as a checkout girl.  But we can also see that there is rather negative sentiment such as ~good, indicating that her performances were not good, and also ~win, indicating that there are a large number of tweets discussing the fact that they do not think that she can win the X Factor.

It will be extremely interesting to see the results of tonights show, in particular if One Direction do end up in the bottom two.  However, as always, we should take note of the fact that the twitter demographic does not necessarily match that of the voting public.  It is free to make a statement on twitter, but it costs money to actually make a vote.

We will analyse the results show tomorrow, to determine the public's view on who is actually removed from the show, and whether they agree with it.