SSLS and CIS team up in student/faculty project

Pictured above: Screenshot of Story Analyzer data related to the 2020 election.

Shawn Lough is not only an SSLS student, he is a faculty member of the Computer Information Systems (CIS) program at JMU. As part of his studies in viewing social media as a venue for political communication, he became interested in the potential of fellow CIS faculty member Mike Mitri’s Story Analyzer, an application that uses natural language processing (NLP) and data visualization to navigate through complex narrative documents and develop visualizations of the interactions between people and groups.

Together Lough and Mitri looked at what insights NLP can bring to the understanding of political leadership in a social media world, using five weeks of data from the from twitter feeds coming from @realDonaldTrump and @JoeBiden, from September 20 through October 24. The fascinating interactive results can be seen at the Story Analyzer site.