A New Study Shows The Hilarious Differences Between American And Canadian Tweets – BuzzFeed News
2016/01/09 Leave a comment
A good example of using social media analysis to complement polling and other public opinion research.
Would be interesting to see whether this technique could move from the general to more specific (e.g., attitudes towards immigrants and refugees):
Linguists at McMaster University have crunched the numbers, and it turns out Canadians really are nicerand more upbeat than Americans, at least on Twitter.
McMaster University / Via dailynews.mcmaster.caThese two word clouds show the most commonly used words by Americans (on the left) and Canadians (on the right).
Two PhD candidates, Daniel Schmidtke and Bryor Snefjella, sorted through about three million geo-tagged tweets from 2015 to get these results.
You may notice that the American results are partially blurred, because there were so many cuss words. Still, you can make out some other favourites like “hell,” “damn,” and “hate.”
McMaster UniversityYep, there’s definitely some “shit” and “ass” in there.
The Canadian cloud, meanwhile, is dominated by upbeat, positive words like “great,” “amazing,” “gorgeous,” and “favourite.”
McMaster University.Also: “habs,” “raptors,” and “leafs.”
“We could see the difference between the two countries’ tweets as soon as we created a word cloud of the findings,” Schmidtke told McMaster Daily News.
Source: A New Study Shows The Hilarious Differences Between American And Canadian Tweets – BuzzFeed News
Multicultural Meanderings 