To understand how Heartbeat works, here is an explanation of the key terms used across the platform.

Messages %
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The y-axis plots the proportion of analyzed messages containing the linguistic features grouped into each theme. A message refers to a singular survey open-ended response, tweet or similar.

In the example above, we can see that in February, the theme 'Affordability' was mentioned in 4.2% of all analyzed tweets.

Totals and averages

When viewing totals the chart displays the percentage of messages containing at least one of the linguistic features grouped into a particular theme.

When viewing averages the chart displays the average frequency of all linguistic features belonging to a particular theme.

Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual views of your data

You can toggle between annual, quarterly monthly, weekly and daily views of your data using the options located beneath the chart.

Click on a point on the chart to reveal the verbatim examples used in the analyzed text and explore the quotes that contribute to the conversation. You can click on each quote to see it in full.

This helps to understand the context in which specific words or phrases are being used to provide a deeper insight into how the public discourse evolves over time.