The Contested Meaning of Abortion (DSI-SRP)
This DSI-SRP fellowship funded Rebecca Rossi to work in the laboratory of Dr. Sophie Bjork-James in the Department of Anthropology during the summer of 2022. Rebecca is a senior with a major Mathematics.
This project examines how individuals and organizations discuss the topic of abortion on social media. By examining Twitter data related to abortion over the time period surround the overturn of Roe v. Wade, Rebecca and Dr. Bjork-James investigated the factors that influence how the conversation occurs, how it changes, and what major themes and sentiments are present. Using Natural Language Processing, Transformer Models, and LDA models, they are investigated different trends and characteristics within their data set. Their data set contains over 6,000 tweets from a variety of different perspectives from June 14th to July 4th. Overall, Rebecca and Dr. Bjork-James hope to better understand how the United States Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has changed or reinforced certain aspects of the conversation surrounding abortion and reproductive rights on social media.
In addition to receiving support through a DSI-SRP fellowship, this project was supported and facilitated by the DSI Data Science Team through their regular summer workshops and demo sessions.