Understanding climate change tweets: an open source toolkit for social media analysis

Abstract

—Collective awareness about climate change is an ongoing problem because there is such a wealth of information available, which can be confusing, contradictory and difficult to interpret. In order to help citizens understand environmental concerns, and to help organisations better inform and target interested people with campaigns, we have developed an open source toolkit to analyse social media data on the topic of climate change. The toolkit comprises methods for extracting, aggregating, and visualising actionable knowledge, based on automatic analysis of large volumes of text. The key terms, topics and sentiments expressed in online discussions are extracted, along with key indicators of climate change, and are stored in a semantic search tool, which enables complex searches over the huge volumes of data. We describe a scenario using the toolkit to gain insights from a large collection of political tweets, showing how we can analyse this dataset for understanding engagement of the public with respect to the topic of climate change.