The Cheltenham Festival dominates the National Hunt season, with the 4 day Festival often being discussed long in advance. Twitter is a platform on which fans, pundits, punters, trainers, jockeys, gamblers can interact and debate about the horse racing. For this reason, I wanted to collect tweets pertaining to the Cheltenham Festival.
This is the second year I have done this, the first was last year (2014), and I wrote up a few views on my old wordpress blog, find links here and here.
This year, having learnt more about R, I am using it and rmarkdown to build this dedicated site, for people to peruse at their leisure. You will find a variety of articles include analysis of twitter per race day; overviews comparing the four days; specific Championship races; comparisons of Championship winners.
Code and data (tweets, etc) is available on github, find it here, which would allow others to perhaps contribute posts/analysis to this site. Don’t hesitate to ask me any questions on twitter, either UTVilla or _RcappeR.
There are three parts to the site, a section that looks at the preparation, from collecting tweets to cleaning the data ahead of analysis. A section that looks at the four individual days and overviews of that days races. The final section looks at the individual races. The preparation section contains the most code as cleaning and collection of tweets is explained, while other sections is primarily content, with plenty of plots.