MU develops Westeros Sentinel to analyze HBO's ''Game of Thrones''

Unpredictable characters, political intrigues and complex social relations are key ingredients behind the success of HBO’s TV fantasy series Game of Thrones. The result is an active exchange on social media platforms, with heated discussions and spirited debates among the fans of the series. With Westeros Sentinel, WebLyzard technology (MU Vienna’s big data and visual analytics spin-off) provides a visual dashboard to explore the online dialog. Released ahead of the series’ fifth season, the system is named after the fictional continent Westeros, which is home to the capital and plays a central part in the storyline.

''Westeros Sentinel uses the webLyzard Web intelligence platform to better understand viewer engagement by analyzing streams of user-generated content”, explained Prof. Arno Scharl, Head of MU Vienna’s Department of New Media Technology. “We have chosen the popular television series Game of Thrones as a showcase, because it has established a reputation for lively and animated discussions via social media platforms”.

The platform addresses changes in the media landscape, and the significant impact of social media on the viewing experience. Television programming professionals no longer measure the success of a show such as Game of Thrones merely by the size of the audience, but rather by engagement. Social media allow audiences, critics, actors, producers, and marketers alike to share experiences, discuss important events, express views and provide interpretations.

Westeros Sentinel captures this social engagement around Game of Thrones and provides a much deeper insight into evolving viewer perceptions and opinions. Advanced text mining tools provide an unprecedented level of transparency about emerging trends. They reveal how new plot elements trigger and shape discussions, for example, or how real-world events such as an actor’s public appearance at an award ceremony affect viewer sentiment.

The system aggregates the user comments from these platforms in real time, and combines them with the latest news articles. It then determines the sentiment of comments about fictional characters automatically, and provides an interactive dashboard with trend charts and visual analytics components.

Through the Sentinel users can quickly ascertain who’s been making news in King’s Landing, at the Wall, across the Narrow Sea, or in any of the other fanciful locations the characters of the popular series find themselves in. Users can check the tendency for their favourite (or most hated) characters to be mentioned in social media and on news sources from around the globe. Though a continuous tracking and logging of data, users can also compare trends from previous episodes and seasons to see the changes in media attention.

Take this week – following Jon Snow’s ascension to Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch and his gripping story line and corresponding screen time, he’s the Internet’s most talked about man in Westeros. Long dead Renly Baratheon made a bit of a comeback in the rankings after Brienne told her story of meeting him – but Rickon Stark barely makes a blip. 

The ‘Word Tree’ allows you to see which phrases are use with a keyword of your choice, and various graphs and charts help to visualize who is getting the most attention in the lands of ice and fire. The keyword visualize shows which words are most often associated with others – a search for Margaery turns up ‘queen’ and her archrival ‘Cersei Lannister’ as commonly associated keywords.

The Westeros Sentinel shares the same technology as the Media Watch on Climate Change, also developed at MODUL, which has already been helping communication experts understand relevant conversations in news and social media through an easy-to-use information dashboard for a few years. 

Researcher Alistair Jones, ‘’We’re hoping to see many more applications of this innovative technology in the future. Political campaigns, marketing and brand awareness, and could all benefit from this approach to information collection and visualization.’’

Try out Westeros Sentinel at got.weblyzard.com!