When Social scientists turn Computational: a conference to save humanity?

Once we filled up in carbs, we came back to the Marriott to come up with our awesome Research questions, to split into two groups and to start hacking!I was in group 1 with the research question of comparing the sentiment trajectory of topics between the different (left or right) media channels..This required topic modelling, sentiment analysis and clustering (if you’re interested in more technical details — be my favorite person and — contact me below!)..The other (and not so liked, as it is a competition overall) group 2 focused on the effect of popularity (number of likes of the vlogs) on the sentiment between left and right media channel vlogs.We found a nice and comfy space within the Marriott (that obviously included couches and many plugs) to plan our 3-hour project..After a good 20-min brainstorm we split into half between our “writing” group members and our “analysis” group members..Funnily enough we ended up having three sub-groups within the analysis team: the fierce python coders running against the legendary (unbiased opinion here…) R programmers that conducted the same topic modelling method, LDA, but in different programming languages and then the less fortunate and MANUAL (still makes me cringe), yes you heard me right, manual and very much predisposed to bias, of coders that had pre-selected two topics (immigration and trade war) and were (for some very odd reason) manually coding regex keywords and using dictionaries to search for text with related terms to manually — I can’t say the word manual anymore (insert face palm here) — but you get the point..Three sub-groups, doing exactly the same thing in different ways..We were all trying to find the top topics discussed in the media channels to then apply sentiment analysis and see how they differ.Our LDA results from our analysis on the top topics found in Media Channels from 2016–2018 — no surprise “trump” is in there…!Despite the redundant method work we were doing, our group was pretty fun..We had people from Italy, Persia, the UK, Greece and Germany, all working together..We may have had a little bit too much fun as when spying on group 2, they seemed to have their sh*t together in comparison..They had already prepared a PowerPoint and had everything ready to go when the time was up..What was group 1 doing?.Still running LDA.. More details

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