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Visualizing Urban vs. Rural Sentiments in Real-Time

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Unifying Themes in Complex Systems IX (ICCS 2018)

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Abstract

Discrepancies in sentiment between urban and rural communities represent a divide which has garnered much media attention yet so far has yielded little research or analysis. In this research, we use sentiment analysis to parse tweets in order to reveal the mood of each demographic group when discussing specific topics. We expose this method through a publicly accessible web application for sentiment tracking. Users are able to track specific keywords on Twitter in order to collect data at different scales, filtering by country, state, or even neighborhood. Using this tool, we find that across a broad range of topics generally believed to be polarizing, urban and rural groups actually express very similar sentiment scores. These results suggest that even though two demographic groups might hold completely opposite views on an issue, there is usually a certain symmetry in the emotion that both groups bring to the discourse.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Jackson Howell

  2. Harvard University Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Nathan Melenbrink

Authors
  1. Jackson Howell
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  2. Nathan Melenbrink
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jackson Howell .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. New England Complex Systems Institute, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Alfredo J. Morales

  2. Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico, Distrito Federal, Mexico

    Carlos Gershenson

  3. New England Complex Systems Institute and University of Massachusetts, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Dan Braha

  4. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

    Ali A. Minai

  5. New England Complex Systems Institute, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Yaneer Bar-Yam

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Howell, J., Melenbrink, N. (2018). Visualizing Urban vs. Rural Sentiments in Real-Time. In: Morales, A., Gershenson, C., Braha, D., Minai, A., Bar-Yam, Y. (eds) Unifying Themes in Complex Systems IX. ICCS 2018. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96661-8_43

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