Visualizing Black Twitter’s Response to the Oscars Ceremonies (2017)

The idea of free expression on social media is extremely pivotal particularly for African-Americans whose voices are often silenced. Black Twitter, a Twitter sub-community, consists of content that focus on current issues and topics that are directly related and affect the black community. Given the results of the past presidential election, conversation has sparked across all media platforms, particularly on Twitter.  The 2017 Academy Awards provide an opportunity to stream and analyze a large number of tweets that would be potentially political and or controversial.  Twitter data is gathered and analyzed in the python programming language using the Jupyter Notebook platform. In order to better visualize the data, various API libraries exist such as pandas, plot.ly, json and Django framework are leveraged.  The Django framework is a high level python web framework that is used for creating quick development, clean and pragmatic design of applications. Built from python and the django framework, plot.ly provides graphing, analytics, and statistics tools for analyzing and visualizing data. Through plot.ly we compare the highly used hashtags and keywords for the Oscars 2016 and 2017 through two separate interactive U.S. maps.  These geographical locations provide insights into how a user’s location can correlate to the social context of their tweets. Once theses commonalties amongst the tweets and their locations are determined, conclusions can be made on how tweeters in the same location can potentially share the same opinion on a particular subject.