Based on my first look at the data I have collected, I assume that the hashtag #ThisIsNotNormal will mainly be used in the United States. It seems that this hashtag developed out of the surprise and shock of many Americans at the new administration. “This is not normal” is a phrase people are using to express what they are experiencing in the United States. This would be in the northern and western hemispheres, which corresponds to a latitude of 0 to 90 degrees (North) and a longitude of -180 to 0 degrees (West). Based on the diagram on our lab instructions, I estimated my hometown to be at roughly 40 degrees North and 100 degrees West. (I looked this up, and it is actually at 42 degrees North and 72 degrees West.) I highly doubt anyone would be tweeting from this location, since it is a small town and people are either very conservative, apolitical, or not too enthralled with social media.<\/p>\n
The #ThisIsNotNormal dataset I collected has 12,351 tweets (as of February 15, 2017). 6 out of 12,351 tweets have geolocation information. This is .0005% or .00% of all tweets. These tweets are all mappable.<\/p>\n
One point Yau makes is that treating every data set the same way would be a huge mistake (Yau 38). Depending on the social media platform, access, and other factors, each data set must be analyzed in its own context. Since researchers cannot collect data about everyone or everything in a population, they must aim for a representative sample of the whole population (Yau 37). It is important to consider who is included in the data set and who is not. Certain populations might be excluded from my data, such as people who prefer other social media platforms, people who do not use social media or do not have access, or people outside of the United States. Looking at geocoordinates, most of the tweets are located in the Northern and Western hemisphere. This fits with my previous estimate that many tweets would come from the United States. All of the tweets are in English. This is not unexpected to me, but it does make me consider who specifically is using this hashtag. There is this idea that the things Trump is doing are completely unprecedented and outrageous, but the truth is nothing is new. Muslims were being heavily profiled before the Muslim ban, for example, and although the ban caused a lot of distress for many people, the people tweeting “this is not normal” seem to be shocked that the profiling is happening. Therefore,\u00a0they might have more privilege and be more likely to be part of the white and primary English section of the United States population, if they are tweeting in the United States.<\/p>\n
In the article “Critical Questions for Big Data” by boyd and Crawford, the authors mention the collection of Twitter messages regarding a certain topic. They note that sets of data on Twitter do not compare to data such as census data and other much larger sets (boyd 663). They poke at the definition of “big” data and stress the importance of having the “capacity to search, aggregate, and cross-reference” (boyd 663). I definitely do not have big data, since this hashtag is fairly small and subjective. I did have a larger number of tweets than some others in the class I discussed with. #MakeAmericaGayAgain had less than 1,000 tweets, most likely because it is very specific and subjective, while #BlackLivesMatter had somewhere around 70,000 tweets since it is a broader topic and an objective descriptor, while #ThisIsNotNormal represents one perspective. B<\/p>\n\n\n