Type a keyword into the input field, then click the Query button. Recent posts that contain your keyword are pulled from Reddit and visualized in the Sentiment tab as circles. Hover your mouse over a post or click on it to see its text. Words highlighted in bold red are query words. Words highlighted in bold red italics are query words that are also being used to estimate the sentiment of a post. Words highlighted in bold blue italics or bold orange italics are additional words being used to estimate the sentiment of a post. Blue words are evaluated as-is. Orange words are evaluated as though they are negated, for example, "happy" versus "not happy".

Posts are visualized in different ways in each of the tabs at the top of the window.

• Sentiment. Each post is shown as a circle positioned by sentiment, an estimate of the emotion contained in the post's text. Unpleasant posts are drawn as blue circles on the left, and pleasant posts as green circles on the right. Sedate posts are drawn as darker circles on the bottom, and active posts as brighter circles on the top. Hover your mouse over a post or click on it to see its text.
• Topics. Posts about a common topic are grouped into topic clusters. Keywords above a cluster indicate its topic. Posts that do not belong to a topic are visualized as singletons on the right. Hover your mouse over a post or click on it to see its text.
• Heatmap. Pleasure and arousal are used to divide sentiment into a 8×8 grid. The number of posts that lie within each grid cell are counted and used to color the cell: red for more posts than average, and blue for fewer posts than average. White cells contain no posts. Hover your mouse over a cell to see its post count.
• Tag Cloud. Common words from the emotional regions Upset, Happy, Relaxed, and Unhappy are shown. Words that are more frequent are larger. Hover the mouse over a word to see how often it occurred.
• Timeline. Posts are drawn in a bar chart to show the number of posts posted at different times. Pleasant posts are shown in green on the top of the chart, and unpleasant posts are shown in blue on the bottom. Hover the mouse over a bar to see how many posts were posted at the given time.
• Affinity. Frequent posts, people, hashtags, and URLs are drawn in a graph to show important actors in the post set, and any relationship or affinity they have to one another. Hover your mouse over a node, or click on a node to see its posts.
• Narrative. Selecting a anchor post of interest from the post list displays a time-ordered sequence of posts that form conversations or narrative threads passing through the anchor post. Hover your mouse over a node or click on it to see its text. Hover your mouse over a link to see all threads that pass through the link, or click on it to see the posts in each thread.
• Posts. Posts are listed to show their date, author, pleasure, arousal, and text. You can click on a column's header to sort by that column.

You can query multiple keywords at once, and combine keywords in different ways. For example, to search for posts with the words "cat" and "dog", enter: cat AND dog. To search for posts with the words "cat" or "dog", enter: cat OR dog. Boolean operators are case sensitive, and must be in all capitals.

To zoom in on the posts in the Sentiment and Topic tabs, click the zoom icon to the right of the Query button. This displays a zoom lens that you can move around the visualization.

We use a sentiment dictionary to estimate sentiment. We search each post for words in the dictionary, then combine the words' pleasure and arousal ratings to estimate sentiment for the entire post. When you hover your mouse over a post's circle to see its text, the words in our dictionary are shown in bold italics. You can click on a post's circle to bring up a dialog that gives even more information.

To learn more details about how our estimates work, take a look at the social media visualization web page.

After Twitter was recently acquired and renamed to X, access to the public APIs was removed. Obtaining Twitter/X posts now requires payment to use their APIs. Due to the cost we would incur based on the number of requests we make, it was no longer feasible to support access to Twitter/X. We are currently querying Reddit, and hope to add additional social media sites over time.

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