A Social Media Analysis of Collective Enthusiasm in Japanese Professional Baseball

Abstract

Enthusiasm is an important human nature that drives the individual behavior and also engages people in collective social movement. To understand the nature of collective enthusiasm, we analyzed social media (Twitter) data on Japanese professional baseball (NPB), which is one of the most popular sports in Japan. We detected and quantified the collective enthusiasm by measuring the co-occurrence of bursts of tweets and retweets, showing that the collective enthusiasm in NPB was related to the outcome of the game and memorable events (e.g., the retirement of a star player). In addition, we compared semantic aspects of NPB teams by examining collective attentions in tweets, revealing different word association patterns linked with the NPB teams’ characteristics.