Date of Award

2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Chris Danforth

Second Advisor

Peter S. Dodds

Abstract

Culture is a fundamental force shaping our view of the world. Filtered through the stories we share on social media, our collective behavior both reflects and amplifies cultural impacts. The present study seeks to describe the effect of cultural factors, such as religion, on happiness scores in Arabic language tweets from January 2010 to June 2023. Our methodology involves using present tools called Hedonometer (https://hedonometer.org/) to study happy and sad events and StoryWrangler (https://storywrangling.org/) to study the usage of keywords related to those events. Our findings reveal a notable pattern of Twitter happiness declining following the start of the Arab Spring in 2010, and this decline persisted until around 2013. This pattern reflects the long-lasting impact of significant Arab Spring events on the overall happiness score on Twitter. Arabic culture seems to be heavily influenced by religion, with religion often being the driving force behind happy events, while acts of violence and conflict related to political and religious injustice are associated with sad events.

Language

en

Number of Pages

45 p.

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