Geoff Ford Political Science x Digital Methods

Text analysis: Twitter sentiment about robot quadrupeds

As part of the Mapping LAWS project I’ve worked on a smaller research project with Jeremy Moses on robot quadrupeds. Our article ‘See Spot save lives: fear, humanitarianism, and war in the development of robot quadrupeds’ is published in Digital War. I collected a large corpus of tweets about Boston Dynamics’ robot quadrupeds and applied sentiment analysis, extending the VADER sentiment library to allow visualisation and analysis of words driving negative and positive sentiment across many tweets. I applied techniques from corpus linguistics to conduct closer analysis of these sentiment-laden words using concordancing.

Skills & Tools: Sentiment analysis; Data visualisation; Data wrangling; Python; Text analysis; Corpus Linguistics.

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