2020 Virtual undergraduate Research symposium

What Would Whitman #Hashtag


PROJECT NUMBER: 64

AUTHOR: Vincent Morgan, Computer Science | MENTOR: Tina Gianquitto, Humanities and Social Sciences

 

ABSTRACT

Social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram have become effective ways to share images and stories about plants with local and global audiences. On these digital platforms, just as in poet Walt Whitman’s writings, everything becomes worth noticing, from a single blade of grass growing in a field to a tree improbably found in an industrial wasteland. Together, the crowd collectively glimpses a biodiversity that is missing in any individual life. The research for this project has consisted of constructing a suitable database and automation tools to utilize Twitter’s API in order to pull directly useful data, specifically on the representation of plants in the digital space, in a medium that can be easily analyzed and referenced later. We have also explored tools that will help us analyze the content on Twitter in order to discover connections and patterns that uncover links between the natural and human worlds. One of these tools is an automated report on the tone, separated into 6 categories, of the text, allowing for quick analytics and processing.

 

VISUAL PRESENTATION

 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Vincent Morgan is a Sophomore Computer Science Major. This is Vincent’s first year doing a MURF research project. He is interested in research Computer Science research into Cybersecurity and other CS topics. Vincent is also interested in interdisciplinary research projects, like this year with HASS and CS, if he can use his CS skills to benefit a research project.

 


1 Comment

  1. Nice project. I was wondering if you did any analysis of the images that you collected? Were any useful trends discovered when correlating the tone of the text and the content of the image?

    All the best!

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