I am collecting data on #BlackLivesMatter to see how political, religious, philosophical, etc. people’s posts/ reflections are.
Rationale:
In high school I never would have understood this hashtag. In Avon, CT, where I am from, the high school’s non-white population was about 5-10%. I only had two or three “friends” who were students of color. Only one of my closest friends was non-white. On the other hand, most of my closest friends at TC are students of color. My roommate, and one of my best friends, is from Nigeria. My other closest friend is a black student from NY, and she is an active participant in the student of color movements on campus. More than that, it was not until Junior year, when I began to grow in friendship with other Engineering students, that I had any white friends at TC. This was not intentional. However, I did intentionally seek out a community of Christian students on campus. It turned out that a majority (all but 3, 5 at most) of the students involved in spiritual groups on campus my freshman year, both Christian and non-Christian, were students of color. Being surrounded by spiritual people provided many opportunities to speak intimately. Somehow our common belief in God or the spiritual world connected us. There was shared compassion for pain and forgiveness for ignorance. I have since attended InterVarsity’s Black Campus Ministry (BCM) conference 3 times. The stories shared by friends, in social media, and at the BCM conferences confirm, to me, the importance of the BlackLivesMatter movement. Moreover, I have learned that the bible and Jesus have a lot to say about the significance of ethnic and social justice. Therefore, I am very interested in studying Twitter data on #BlackLivesMatter hashtags.
First Impressions:
The following tweets appeared frequently:
RT @ScootaThaShoota: Ok I am going to say this one more time:
Fuck
DONALD
TRUMP ??
#BlackHistoryMonth
#BlackLivesMatter
RT @_FemaleKanye: Say it loud , IM BLACK AND IM PROUD ✊?✊?✊? #BlackLivesMatter #BlackHistoryMonth ???
The length of the first tweet and the emojis in the second tweet made them easy to recognize, while scrolling through the scraped data. Both posts are political. The first tweet uses offensive language and emojis against a controversial non-black man, and the second tweet uses language and emojis to declare black pride.
News Search:
After searching #BlackLivesMatter at https://news.google.com, I was surprised to find that no credible news site (i.e. The New York Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Hartford Courant, etc.) has published an article on #BlackLivesMatter within the past week. Being that February is Black History Month in the US, I expected the search results to be more plentiful. The top article to include mention of #BlackLivesMatter is titled “In 2014, a White Cop Shot a Black Teenager – and Black Lives Matter Came to Life”. (Biswas) The first quote that appears in the article is from President Trump. The quote states, “Our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before, ever, ever, ever…You take a look at the inner cities… You get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street.” I suspect that over the course of the semester, many of the Tweets and articles written about #BlackLivesMatter will include quotes from and commentary regarding President Trump. The article continues with a recount of the Black Lives Matter movement. Biswas begins by mentioning the shooting of 18-year-old Darren Wilson, a black man who was shot 6 times by a white police office for walking out of a convenience store with $34 worth of cigarillios that Darren had not paid for. Biswas also states that, “Motivations for those drawn to the “Movement for Black Lives” vary. Some have had run-ins with the law; some are driven by their religious faith (like Brittany Packnett, who was brought up in a household that worshiped “a table-flipping revolutionary Jesus with brown skin and Afro hair”); some have suffered hardship.” I found this quote to be especially interesting, and intend to us words that infer the law, religion and suffering in my Twitter data analysis.
When a google news search was performed for “Black Lives Matter”, only two credible news articles appeared in the findings. One of the articles was not even listed as one of the top ten articles. The first article, published by the Guardian, is titled “They Can’t Kill Us All: The Story of Black Lives Matter by Wesley Lowery – Review.” (Sandhu) As inferred by the title, the article promotes Wesley Lowery’s memoir They Can’t Kill Us All . The memoir “aspires to tell the story of Ferguson, Missouri where, in August 2014, weeks of protest and rioting broke out in the aftermath of the shooting of an unarmed black American, Michael Brown, by white police officer Darren Wilson.” This article is not informative platform for recent events regarding the Black Lives Matter movement. Rather, it identifies a book that does. The second credible article, published by Time, is titled “Minnesota Man Allen Scarsella Found Guilty of Shooting Black Lives Matter Protesters”. This article presents “breaking news”, the genre that I expected to find in an article recently published about the Black Lives Matter Movement.
It seems that the Black Lives Matter Movement was not reported on at all in 2006. Google located one article in which “Black Lives Matter” was written. The article, published by Science Daily, titled “You Don’t Say: Patient-doctor Nonverbal Communication Says A Lot” (Indiana University). However, when I clicked on the article, I found that “Black Lives Matter” was only quoted in a link, on the side of the web page, to an article written in 2015. These findings match the narrative summarized by Biswas, who stated that the movement began in 2014. There appears to be no relevant connection between the article and the link. Perhaps the link appeared because I have been searching for #BlackLivesMatter recently. Or, it may be that Science Daily has interest in promoting the Black Lives Matter Movement to all of its reader. However, this seems unlikely. This article was brief, objective and only stated the results of the trial. The language used in this article does not match the emontion and subjective language used in the Tweets.
In the article “Scraping the Social?” Marres writes, “Information extraction has been generally defined as ‘the automatic extraction of structured information such as entities, relationships between entities, and attributes describing entities from unstructured sources’”. After skimming through tweets and reading through articles, it seems that the ‘extraction’ process will be the easiest step in the data analysis process. How we will identify relationships between entities will be more difficult. How are we supposed to identify correlations? Marres also suggests that we must consider, “how we establish the difference between researching the medium and researching the social.” Perhaps the only way to evaluate this would be to scrape data from several data bases and compare across sources. Since we will not be doing this for the Data Driven Cultures course, we must keep in mind when presenting findings and conclusions. I am in another data visualization course, and I hope that I will be able to apply these data scraping methods at the neighborhood level in Hartford.
Citations:
Abrams, Abigail. 2017. “Minnesota Man Who Shot Black Lives Matter Protesters Found Guilty.”Time. Febraury 2
http://time.com/4659124/allen-scarsella-black-lives-matter-protestors-guilty/
Biswas, K. 2017. “In 2014, a White Cop Shot a Black Teenager – and Black Lives Matter Came to Life.” New Statesman, February 3.
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/02/2014-white-cop-shot-black-teenager-and-black-lives-matter-came-life
Indiana University. 2006. “You Don’t Say: Patient-doctor Nonverbal Communication Says A Lot.”ScienceDaily January 30
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/01/060130155029.htm
Marres, Noortje, and Esther Weltevrede. 2013. “Scraping the Social?” Journal of Cultural Economy 6 (3): 313–35.
Sandhu, Sukhdev. 2017. “They Can’t Kill Us All: The Story of Black Lives Matter by Wesley Lowery – Review.” The Observer, January 30. Guardian News and Media
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/30/they-cant-kill-us-all-story-black-lives-matter-wesley-lowery-review
I was especially interested in your mentions of faith as it connects to #blacklivesmatter—both in your own experience and in relation to the movement and its members. Did you come across any related hashtags that pertain to faith or other commonalities within the movement?
Like you, I came across a small number of repeated tweets centering around a specific event (in your case Black History Month, in mine a piece of relevant protest legislation) that gained widespread attention. I wonder if other ‘popular’ tweets will crop up in relation to specific events going forward.
I appreciate how you connected the hashtag to your experiences at Trinity. During this time of incredible racial tension, I would expect this is a very active hashtag. I also thought it was insightful to find a tweet from Donald Trump, especially around the time of the inauguration. Considering many people using this hashtag positively are opposed to the election of Donald Trump, it is intriguing to see his use of the term. I think something interesting to dive into would be connecting this hashtag with others. In other words, what hashtags are usually accompanied by #blacklivesmatter. I think there would be something cool in finding the people who regularly use this hashtags and see what other social/civil rights topics they could have tweeted about. Clearly this hashtag and #woke fall in line with each other. I’ve realized that my hashtag could be used as a gateway to more specific civil rights issues like this one. I’ve learned that my hashtag is so broad that it is critical to use others to dig deeper into my research.