Question: What are the differences between those within Ferguson and those just outside of Ferguson with regard to what they tweeted about the events in Ferguson?
Analysis of Word Cloud: When observing the data in Pulsar, I was interested in looking at the differences in the overall themes of the tweets coming from Ferguson itself and an outside city. I decided to name St. Louis as the outside city, believing I would find interesting results among two cities in such close proximity of one another.
I found that 4.84 percent of the tweets regarding Ferguson were from St. Louis while only 1.54 percent of the tweets were from Ferguson. At first I found this surprising as St. Louis seemed to tweet more than three times as much about Ferguson than those actually situated in Ferguson. However, this drastic pattern could be due to the idea that many residents in Ferguson may have tweeted without mentioning the name of their own city, assuming that those following them would know the location of the tweeter. The tweets that do not mention the name Ferguson are not listed in the data set and therefore the number of individuals who appear to have tweeted from Ferguson within this particular data set could be drastically fewer than the number of individuals who tweeted about the events taking place in their hometown.
The word clouds of each city’s respective tweets demonstrated this disparity among tweets from Ferguson. While the word cloud from St. Louis hailed 53 words, phrases, and Twitter handles, the word cloud from Ferguson only yielded 11. Both word clouds contain the terms “Ferguson,” “#Ferguson,” and “police” as its three largest words. The word cloud from Ferguson also contained the terms “protesters” and “protest pd” in large font, and the terms “media” and “people” in smaller font. The word cloud from St. Louis contains multiple Twitter handles from popular journalists and news stations, and contains words such as “new” and “breaking.”
Conclusions Drawn from Further Investigation: This data shows that a lot of the media reporting from the Ferguson area were actually located in St. Louis. While many people may have been “live tweeting” throughout the events in Ferguson, a failure to mention “Ferguson” in the tweets could have caused their tweets to not be accounted for in research of the events. It can also be inferred from the word clouds, however, that the tweets reached by a wide audience from Ferguson were from common Twitter users because the common words used in the tweets did not involve other Twitter handles or words suggesting that a news source was using them. The tweets that reached a broad audience from St. Louis, however, were likely to have been from news stations. Furthermore, the large presence of Twitter handles in the word cloud representing St. Louis and the lack of such handles in the word cloud representing Ferguson lead to the inference that people in Saint Louis seem to have been more likely to retweet and reply to other sources while those in Ferguson were often able to see the events at hand and therefor not tweet to or retweet others.
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