Browsing through some of the tweets between 2/2/17 through 2/8/17, I saw a lot of tweets relating to veterans before refugees and people targeting Starbucks about their recent political stances. I hope to see more discussion about the second amendment rather than indirect references with a more in-depth analysis.
In the time span listed above, there are 934,171 words with 27,589 unique words listed. It is interesting to see that under some of the most used words per day, a lot of the words are usernames instead of common words such as the, must, etc. I am not surprised that the most common word is #2a since it was the tag all of my tweets were collected from.
The most used term outside of the stopwords is NRA, which is not surprising since this topic is dealing with the second amendment and firearm rights. What stumped me is the second and fourth most used terms are #MAGA and 1a. I know 1a means the first amendment, however, that deals with freedom of speech so not sure how it is relevant to my topic. I have no idea what #MAGA is, though. The new stopwords I eliminated are:
â, 2000-2017, 0000, and ðŸ
I changed my scale to show 125 terms.
In the terms shown, I noticed a lot of use of the nra, tcot, and maga. I am not too surprised to see these terms used when referring to the second amendment, as it is a topic discussed heavily in the republican party and these are heavily right terms. I am still surprised to see the term 1a in the mix, and used often as well. Another term I was surprised about was coffee, which might be referring to a coffee corporation hiring veterans. The cloud contains some obvious and subtle arguments, the main topic being firearm control while the more subtle is a discussion about the media.
I am choosing tcot, trump, maga, and nra since they all relate to current events and some of trumps proposals in the recent month. I am not too surprised that majority of these terms all increase in use over one day, since the discussion of Trump’s proposed new gun laws took place from 2/3-2/6. MAGA saw a major uptick as well due to trump coming out with multiple bills in such a short time period, thus it is used outside of my tag.
http://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=1589b8530c69073cc43ffc1d68a7494d
I am using an article from the New York Times published on Feb. 7th about Trump’s recent plan to change some firearm control rights. Aside from the general stopwords, I did not need to eliminate any words from this article. The biggest differences I see are the use of database, mental, health, policy, and Obama. It is interesting to see these terms when referring to firearm control since there has been a debate about mental health checks and creating a database to track all firearm owners, but this talk has been passed over on twitter. I am not sure why these debate topics have been left out, but it will be interesting to see how these ideas develop over time.
Harrison,
Another week, another post! Your post showed a lot of thought especially where you mentioned that you looked through your tweets and found that it was focused on veterans, refugees, and Starbucks scandal. It is a valuable skill to go thru your data and look for patterns. I like the amount of words you put into the wordcloud, I feel that it paints a good picture of your data. I would consider, for the future, to keep adding words to the stoplist so that you can eliminate some of the random letters and words that pop up. Your second wordcloud makes me view the recent pushes towards new gun laws differently, because it shows that the main issues involve Obama’s old policies and mental health issues. Have a great break my friend!
Harrison, it seems that the people used #2a in a more positive light based on your comparison with the text analyses of the tweets and article. I’m surprised that Twitter users did not discuss more about gun violence or more tweets expressed disapproval of #2a. I’m surprised that the the most popular terms included pro-conservative terms such as tcot (“Top Conservatives on Twitter”), NRA, and Trump. It challenges my previous notions that Twitter has become a forum for more liberal points of view; it seems that more conservatives are using Twitter to express their viewpoints especially if major new outlets like the New York Times only cover the cons of gun ownership.
I am interested in seeing if there was a uptake in tweets or terms related to speaking against #2a during a holiday as I realized that many media sources tend to cover gun-related violence and compare the number of incidences to the previous year during the holidays (ex. Chicago shootings during Christmas). Unfortunately, there aren’t any major holidays in February or March, but I wonder if you could compare this text analysis with one during the major holiday. To see if people are using #2a to express opposition against the 2nd Amendment, you should include the usage of an anti-2a term that did trend somewhat to your graph. I am interested in seeing a comparison between Tim and your cloud since I believe that #maga stands for Make America Great Again.
Your text analysis makes me more rethink my analysis by considering the opposing sides of my issue more. I commonly thought that most those who speak out of Trump’s immigration policies used #nobannowall but those who support it may use it but are not clearly represented in my data. In addition, I now consider why these people use Twitter to convey their ideas instead of using traditional media sources.