QUEER CHATTER

Type: Website
Year: 2019
Platform: Web Browsers
Development Environment: Python, JavaScript, Mapbox GL

This is a course project inspired by Queering the Map, which marks comments submitted by Queer people on a world map.

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Until today, Queering the Map has collected 17,000+ stories from all over the world, from which we can see the everyday lives of queer people. However, by contrast, we will not be able to find how the entire society think about queer people, as we cannot expect too many non-LGBTQ people spend time on this website writing something and submitting them. Also, not all queer people know Queering the Map. They may spend most of their time on mainstream SNS like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, posting their stories which will never be collected by Queering the Map.

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To solve the above drawbacks, we designed Queer Chatter aiming at collecting queer related comments from Twitter. We chose Twitter as the dataset instead of other SNS (like Facebook and Instagram) since Twitter officially provides APIs for scraping data. Most of the tweets contain approximate location data (the minimum unit is a city), while a few of them include precise geo-coordinates (if the user chose to mark their precise location when tweeting), thus we can draw a map with tweets throughout Canada.

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The project was done by me and another colleague. We scraped tweets involving queer keywords and hashtags of 7 days window using Twitter API. Once we acquired the data, we extracted the locations of the tweets and drew then on a Canada map, which is implemented with Mapbox GL API. Also, we conducted sentiment analysis using Google Natural Language as well as a manual opinion review for each tweet, and illustrate them with different icons. Audiences can browse the queer Tweets with numerous filters like emotion, opinion, the accuracy of location, keywords, and hashtags.

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A sample instance of this project is here:
https://queerchatter.updog.co/index.html

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However, due to the limit of the server, the page may not able to be browsed sometimes, and the API keys of Mapbox will expire every few months. Also, we don't maintain this project anymore, so the data do not keep up-to-date.