Digital Humanities 150:
Social Media Data Analytics
FINDINGS
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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From our Tableau visualization of the geographical location related to tweets, the most activity was found in New York, California, Texas, and Florida. While considering the fact that these states have many residents, we believe there is a potential relation to the demographics of the state and its influence on how much people view the COVID-19 pandemic. New York, for example, was dealing with a massive spike in COVID-19 cases during the trending period of the hashtag. Reports show that NY daily cases of more than 1000 began on March 18, 2020. The daily reported cases on March 24, 2020, the day of the hashtag, were at 4,805 and only continued to go up the rest of the month. In addition, a 2016 exit poll found that New York voters dislike Wall Street. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/19/wall-streets-home-state-hates-wall-street/) About more than half of Republicans and 6 in 10 Democrats all stated they believe Wall Street hurts the economy. Reasons as to why New York recorded a high number of tweets related to the hashtag could be due to the growing number of cases in New York and negative sentiment towards Wall Street.
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As for the other states, this may be due to the larger population size and political affiliations. For California, the large state was not recording many cases at the time of the hashtag. Daily cases were around 400 and maintained lower levels until the holiday surge of 2020. California is known for its left-leaning politics and policies, which may indicate why there were a high number of tweets recorded from this hashtag. Texas and Florida also record a large population size and right-leaning politics and policies. Texas and Florida both were recording the same number of cases as California on March 24, 2020. Correlation between the number of recorded tweets from geographical coordinates is mainly due to the large population size, politics, and sentiments towards Wall Street. ​
The visualization above shows lesser number of people tweeting in every state as compared to the #NotDying4WallStreet. This tells us that more people were supportive of #NotDying4WallStreet. All tweets are generally below 100 with Texas having the most number of tweets with #ReopenAmerica. While the number 28 is still less compared to the #NotDying4WallStreet, Texas may have the highest number of tweets in support of reopening America as it is a big state and considered a red state (https://www.texastribune.org/2021/01/19/donald-trump-texas-republicans-reckoning/).
In conclusion, majority of the states were supporting the #NotDying4WallStreet as they believed lives to be more important than economy.