Borasky Research Journal Google+ Page Data Journalism Developer Studio 2012LX Blog
Last week, two stories broke about vendors showing off their sentiment analysis tools on social media messages about the 2012 election. The “smaller” story is about Twitter “predicting” the results of the New Hampshire primary. The “larger” story is about Facebook making a deal with Politico to share public and private data about the GOP candidates.
As you can imagine this topic is of extreme interest to me, and I’ve taken two steps in researching this story.
- I’ve put the CRAN sentiment analysis library packages ‘textir‘ and ‘tm.sentiment‘ into the base Data Journalism Developer Studio 2012 appliance, so you can experiment with this in the comfort and safety of your own home, without having to buy any software.
- I’ve started curating news and technology articles on the topic at Scoop.it: Sentiment Analysis and the 2012 Election.
I’m not sure how long this is going to be an active news story. The ACLU has weighed in on the Facebook – Politico deal, but in the larger context of SOPA, it may get lost in the shuffle.
Research papers on sentiment analysis:
- Liu, Bing, Sentiment Analysis and Subjectivity
- Taddy, Matthew A., Inverse Regression for Analysis of Sentiment in Text
- Taddy, Matthew A., On Estimation and Selection for Topic Models
