Digital Humanities 150:
Social Media Data Analytics
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#notdying4wallstreet
P R O J E C T D E S C R I P T I O N
The #NotDying4WallStreet dataset consists of Tweets posted on March 24, 2020, in which users expressed and retweeted their sentiments on President Donald Trump Jr.’s desire to reopen workplaces in the United States for economic purposes amidst the Coronavirus pandemic. The possibility of reopening the country sparked the birth of the viral hashtag. Many Twitter users expressed fears regarding the health risks in addition to frustrations surrounding the bailouts corporations and financial institutions were seeking. Our team chose to focus on this dataset because of the hashtag’s unwavering relevance throughout the COVID-19 crisis. of the hashtag as the 1-year mark since the pandemic began, the ability to compare an opposing hashtag, and the search for the root of users’ sentiments.
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After a brief analysis of the dataset, our group intends to answer our research questions through meaningful insights, digital methods, and computational tools.
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R E S E A R C H Q U E S T I O N S
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How does the content or nature of the tweet potentially relate to the location that the tweet came from? Does this impose further questions about the role of geography in how people view the Covid crisis and reopening the U.S. economy?
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What other hashtags, keywords, or phrases were used alongside #NotDying4WallStreet? What can this imply about the political and economic climate surrounding COVID-19?
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How is this hashtag similar to or different from #ReopenAmerica in terms of the roots of users’ frustrations? (prioritizing capitalism vs. prioritizing health and science)
Significance
Our project addresses the sociopolitical and economic climate surrounding the #NotDying4WallStreet trend on Twitter. By creating this website, we aim to inform readers of the tensions surrounding corporate and governmental expectations for Americans getting back to work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our data visualizations highlight the deep anxiety and emotions surrounding Donald Trump’s push to restart the economy. With many Tweets angrily charged toward Trump and the GOP, our project also touches on how the public and other public figures use Twitter to communicate with political figures and ideas.
Audience
With this project, we strive to target a younger audience, as 38% of Twitter users are between the ages of 18-29 years old (Chen, 2020). We hope to relate this real-life data to some of the incredibly important conversations that took place over the course of 2020, and we hope to effectively demonstrate the intersection between the issues of Covid, political divides, and socioeconomic inequities in America. This project can help inform any younger adults or teenagers who are curious about any of these pressing topics and can help with visualizing and transforming this data into more digestible content.
This course aims to critically think about the ethical use of social media data and consider how social media has been used to support social justice and political change movements, how is social media data handled by data corporations, and whether there is 'good' in the use of social media data.
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Through a hands-on approach with data analytics, teams selected datasets from multiple Twitter hashtags to analyze, research, and bring meaningful insights to light. Students were tasked with creating research questions to guide their data methods. This website presents our findings, explanations for our methods, and significance.
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Thank you to Professor Ashley Garcia-Sanders for this learning opportunity and for teaching us all the necessary tools and resources to guide our quarterly project.
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