Juan's RLAC Notes

Final Project Plan

written with Aryamaan Dholakia

For this project, we will be focusing on the emotions of sadness, joy, fear/anger (still deciding) through all the Rooftop Rhythms episodes to analyze patterns regarding how these emotions vary with time, both across semesters and through the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis will allow us to gain insights regarding the thoughts and emotions of individuals around the world, and how they, and Rooftop Rhythms as a space, have evolved in the last two years.

We will do this by creating a corpus of episodes of Rooftop Rhythms from Fall 2019 to Spring 2021, on which we will carry out a sentiment analysis that will return us the ratio of each one of the emotions in the ‘nrc’ lexicon per each of the episodes. To start our exploration, we will plot these quantities in relation to time, and analyse the interaction between the different emotions. Are some emotions mutually exclusive, or do some of them vary concurrently?

Afterwards, we will perform topic modelling to attempt a critical analysis of our lexicon: we will attempt to identify whether there are topics whose frequency is related to that of certain emotions. Our aim here will be to identify words which in the context of Rooftop Rhythms are associated with certain emotions, but wouldn’t necessarily be in a general lexicon. Are there, then, words that mean joy, sadness, or, fear/anger only in the context of Rooftop Rhythms?

With Juan’s background in R and computer science, he would be looking over the sentiment analysis section of our project. At the same time, Aryamaan will be overseeing topic modelling and collocate analysis on AntConc/Voyant. Once we have finished this, we will then identify patterns and trends together to brainstorm arguments to make in our essay. Once we have listed our observations and arguments, we will then divide the essay into two parts – one part per individual – and go ahead and write the essay. After one final check, we will build our website and publish.