The purpose of this app is to visualise the weekly hot topics at the Assembly. The data comes from the twitter hashtags used by AMs, and is therefore biased towards the members who use twitter most and in particular those who use a lot of hashtags. This plot, with the variable of interest communicated thorugh the area of a circle is called a “bubble plot”. There is a weakness to this type of plot in that it is actually quite difficult for the user to compare circle areas with the naked eye. This is a problem if you are trying to communicate a single set of data, however in this visualisation we are more interested in trends over time and I think it is a useful way to compare subjects that are recurring (hint: Brexit), and those that are one off (a particular rugby victory). To help with following issues I have added some colour to the visualisation, “Brexit” is yellow, “Wales” and “Cymru” are green and sports related hashtags are red.
It is possible for you to decide to show only tweets / retweets and to choose which parties to include. The party affiliation is as it stood in early June 2019, however given the history of this Assembly I am expecting to have to update it soon!