Research Projects
Racial Politics and Sentiment on Twitter: The Dynamics of Online Emotional Language
Colin Wayne Leach, Psychology, Africana Studies
Courtney Cogburn, Social Work
Sining Chen, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
Kathleen McKeown, Computer Science
Susan McGregor, Data Science Institute
Social media is a powerful means of individual expression, and collective consolidation, of people’s sentiment about the most important issues in our society. This transdisciplinary project marries the latest advances in computational and statistical techniques of language use over time with social behavioral theories of emotion and stress to examine the temporal dynamics of tweets surrounding police killings of Black people and subsequent protests (e.g., Black Lives Matter).