Professor Barnard
Twitter and Society
2-28-16

In exploring the data on Pulsar, something interesting that I searched was “cops” and “riot”. I set the dates for my search from August 8th, 2014 to January 1st, 2015. My word cloud confirmed my prediction that my results would be most all negative. Some of my other predictions came true that some of the tweets would be about the cops having to control the rioters.

Most of the tweets that I saw were pictures of cops fully clad in riot gear. I wonder if this type of dress further incited more riots and amplified the situation even more than it was. My word cloud included the word “gear”, which was interesting to me, because I think that it blew up the situation even more. When you see cops wearing riot gear, the fight or flight response kicks in. For some people in Ferguson, I believe that they started to fight back because they feared for their safety.

Some common themes that I saw arise through most of the tweets were fear, anger, pain, and injustice. Most of the questions that arose were about why did the police think it was acceptable to treat people so poorly. The information emphasized by the word cloud was how much people focused on the riots in ferguson rather than the underlying point about race inequality. The word cloud portrays all of the overarching themes, but it doesn’t encompass the specific focuses and details within the main themes. In relation to “Big Data: Methodological Challenges and Approaches for Sociological Analysis”, it is challenging to get the qualitative perspective, which sometimes can be just as or even more valuable in finding key insights and emotions within data.