A couple of weeks ago some colleagues and I published a post on the Bank of England’s independent blog ‘Bank Underground’, which acts as a forum for staff to post novel views that don’t necessarily align with the Bank’s official line. The post describes a project undertaken in the run up to the Scottish independence referendum to try and identify bank runs using Twitter data. You can read the full post here.

Since it was published it’s generated a fair amount of discussion and interest. The Wall Street Journal released an amusingly titled story on their Money Beat program, ‘Bank of England Analyzes Twitter, Discovers Minnesota Vikings’. City AM also wrote a short piece on the project, focusing on the alternative applications for the text mining techniques cited at the end of the post.

We’ve also had some briefer mentions in the London Evening Standard’s City Spy column (bestowing us the honourable title of ‘tech-wonks’), Bloomberg’s Money Stuff, and the BBC’s Business Live stream.

It was really exciting to be involved in such a high profile project, and one of the highlights of my two years at the Bank. It’s also great that we’ve had the opportunity to share what we did with the public. I’m looking forward to seeing how the team evolves over the next few years, and seeing some of the techniques and projects I’ve worked on since the Scots referendum coming to fruition.