TECVis: A Visual Analytics Tool to Compare People’s Emotion Feelings
Authors: Naisarg Halvadiya, Trina Haque
Faculty Supervisor: Shahrukh Humayoun
Department: Computer Science
The rise of social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) has transformed the way we access and disseminate information. They allow us to obtain not only news and updates from multiple sources but provide a powerful medium for the people to express their feelings and reactions towards events or topics. The Twitter (X) platform enables users to share their feelings and news through short text messages called ”tweets”. These tweets often come with additional metadata (e.g., user profile, geolocation, timestamp, etc.) creating a valuable information resource for various analytical purposes. One way to better explore tweet data is about comparison of peoples’ reaction towards the same event from different geolocations, e.g., peoples’ reaction towards COVID-19 or their views regarding recent US Supreme Court ruling in 2022 to overturn Roe vs. Wade abortion right. Such comparison exploration of tweet data, which is missing in previous work, would help us analyzing better public views towards some events or topics, which could be useful to under- stand better the political and social norms of different geolocations. Targeting this concern, we developed a visual analytics tool, called TECVis (Tweets’ Emotions Comparison Visualizer), that focuses on comparison of peoples’ feelings towards an event or topic using the emotions in tweets (i.e.: anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust) and sentiment analysis (i.e.: negative, neutral, and positive). The comparison is done based on geolocations or timestamps, where users would be able to explore peoples’ feelings towards the same event or topic from different geolocations or from one timestamp to another timestamp. TECVis provides several interaction and filtering options so users can navigate the underlying tweet data for better exploration.