Twitter users reveal Star Wars’ most popular characters on May the 4th

It’s Star Wars Day (May the Fourth be with you), so let’s celebrate by looking at social media data! I promise it’s more exciting than it sounds!

StreamSets Data Collector decided to mark the day by using information gathered from Twitter to discover which Star Wars characters were the most popular. StreamSet looked for references to heroes and villains from the series from 250,000 tweets over 12 days. The character at the top? Darth Vader. That’s not too surprising. Vader (or Anakin Skywalker before he became more machine than man) is one of the most iconic villains of all time, his redemption is a high point of the series, and he has appeared as a major character in six of the seven films (with the seventh and latest, The Force Awakens, still making plenty of references to him). You can check out the full list of most popular Star Wars characters, followed by how many times they were mentioned in tweets, below.

• Darth Vader: 12,967
• Yoda: 9,736
• Han Solo: 5,616
• Kylo Ren: 5,456
• Rey: 5,009
• Finn: 1,771
• Captain Phasma: 855
• Emperor Palpatine: 721

Above: The characters left standing in StreamSets Minecraft visualization of the data.

Image Credit: StreamSets

“StreamSets is always looking for interesting ways to bring the value of data to life,” StreamSets’ Pat Patterson, community champion, noted with the release. “Our Star Wars data visualization shows how simply StreamSets can ingest data from a streaming source, in this case the Twitter API (application program interface), apply transformations and deliver a digestible output for visualization. While this example is a fun illustration of the platform’s capabilities, StreamSets delivers the same ease of use no matter the purpose and scope of an organization’s data pipeline.”

Yoda was in second. As much as Vader represents the Dark Side of the Force, Yoda is the standard-bearer for the Light. However, it is strange to see Luke Skywalker, a hero from the original films, off the list. It’s also worth noting that three characters from The Force Awakens made the cut.

StreamSets also broke things down by Light/Dark Sides, noting that good won the day with 22,132 tweets versus evil’s 19,999. Classic characters also saw 29,040 tweets, beating out the 13,091 amassed from the new crew.

You can learn more about how StreamSets gathered this data from its site. Let’s just be grateful that Force power isn’t won with a popularity contest, or Vader would be ruling the galaxy by now.