St. Lawrence University
Iqra Khan
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Question: How did the Ferguson incident provoke people to express their opinion about the social justice system in America? 

Analysis of Word Cloud: For my Analysis, I just wanted to specifically see what results would come up by using the hashtag “America” for Ferguson. I kept the timeline for my filter open allowing all the data available to be included in my word could analysis. There were a total of 525 tweets that included either the hashtag or key word America. Some of the themes in the word cloud and results: A majority of the tweets were from the United States with Missouri and California with the most tweets. This can be seen by the location map here on the side. It also shows us other locations where the keyword was used for example Massachusetts and New York. Also, most of the tweets were negative illustrated with a frowning emoji and many tweets were by the American civil rights activist, Deray Mckesson. The Word cloud here clearly shows that when using the keyword America a number of other keywords or hashtags appear. Therefore, indicating that the majority of the tweets related to this keyword circled around the police, black, Ferguson and Deray. The larger the word appear the greater number of mentions.

Conclusions drawn from further investigation: Before conducting my analysis I was pretty confident that I would find a lot of results surrounding the social justice system when I use the keyword America. Looking closer at my results, I found that many of the tweets related to the keyword “America”, did indeed, talk about the social justice system in the country. The tweets not only discussed institutional racism that has been prevalent for decades but also criticized Barak Obama for being hypocritical. Here is one example:

“Failure in #Ferguson? @AllenWest: Pres @BarackObama is HYPOCRITICAL - America should be tired of social justice cherry picking @FoxNews”

Here is another example:
“nothing else, Ferguson has forced the country out of the fantasy that America had entered a “post-racial” era. http://t.co/8zjVFOTO07 link”

Although Pulsar provides us with a lot of useful information it does lack some tools that could allow us to further encode more details. This search it would have been really beneficial to see the demographic “race” as it would give us a lot more information of what different races have to say when using specific keywords. Relating this to the article: Big Date: Methodological Challenges and Approaches for Sociological Analysis We can definitely say that although big data is very beneficial is does however have its limitations. Sometimes the information may not consider external factors that may influence the data and therefore can restrict its ability to provide accurate results for every specific case.