Gauging Ecliptic Sentiment
Gautam Srivastava · 2018
With the Great American Eclipse of 2017, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) production of social media content was crucial to the general public's awareness and understanding of the event. To date, it may have been NASA's largest production of an event spanning many social media platforms and hundreds of media outlets. Since NASA is government funded, the millions of dollars spent on their social media campaign of the eclipse requires evaluation. The primary goal with this paper is to understand how the public perceived the social media coverage that NASA provided, specifically in the world of Twitter, a free social networking microblogging service that allows registered members to broadcast short posts called tweets. The aforementioned goals are accomplished through sentiment analysis and the spotting of trends within Twitter data attached to the eclipse itself and to NASA. Furthermore, a framework is created that can be applied in the future to gauge the effectiveness of social media campaigns in a variety of categories in a simple and cost-effective manner.