Sentiment Analysis

Emotion is a fundamental part of the human experience. New data sources and methods are enabling geographers to study how people experience emotions in place. Emotions are challenging to study as they are composed of both internal processes in the mind and are sometimes externally expressed in the body. No single method captures the full human experience of an emotion. Two methods of characterizing emotion that are becoming frequently used are facial emotion recognition and sentiment analysis. In particular, sentiment analysis has been applied to location-based social media data in an attempt to capture the public mood in different locations at specific points in time. These data sources and methods help geographers to understand how people feel as well to compare the emotions of different people at a particular place and time.