Sentiment analysis in geo social streams by using machine learning technique

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesMassive amounts of sentiment rich data are generated on social media in the form of Tweets, status updates, blog post, reviews, etc. Different people and organizations are using these user generated content for decision making. Symbolic techniques or Knowledge base approaches and Machine learning techniques are two main techniques used for analysis sentiments from text. The rapid increase in the volume of sentiment rich data on the web has resulted in an increased interaction among researchers regarding sentiment analysis and opinion (Kaushik & Mishra, 2014). However, limited research has been conducted considering location as another dimension along with the sentiment rich data. In this work, we analyze the sentiments of Geotweets, tweets containing latitude and longitude coordinates, and visualize the results in the form of a map in real time. We collect tweets from Twitter using its Streaming API, filtered by English language and location (bounding box). For those tweets which don’t have geographic coordinates, we geocode them using geocoder from GeoPy. Textblob, an open source library in python was used to calculate the sentiments of Geotweets. Map visualization was implemented using Leaflet. Plugins for clusters, heat maps and real-time have been used in this visualization. The visualization gives an insight of location sentiments

Translanguaging and Young Muslim Children’s Negotiations of Intersectional Muslim Identities in an English Reception Classroom: A Linguistic Ethnographic Study

Young children’s translanguaging between different languages is underexplored and often examined in relation to questions of learning and teaching. In contrast, this study examines young Muslim children’s translanguaging in a London-based Islamic school. The context is one in which they and their teachers face contradictions about supporting language diversity, and public discourses and policies post 9/11, which regard practices related to Islam, including using Arabic, as suspicious. This study explores the interface of Muslim children’s translanguaging and negotiations of intersectional Muslim identities in the school setting, set within this broader Islamophobic context. Using a linguistic ethnographic approach informed by Bakhtinian heteroglossia, intersectionality and the social studies of childhood, this study examined young reception children’s engagement with translanguaging in formal and informal activities across different spaces. I draw on participant observations, informal conversations, and video recorded social interactions. I argue that young children translanguage in complex ways, shaped by institutional practices, broader social-historical discourses and language ideologies, creating dynamic language hierarchies. While Standard English dominated formal pedagogical spaces, Quranic Arabic was valued as the liturgical language of Islam. Similarly, while French was linked to social prestige, Urdu was viewed simultaneously as ethnic pride and a source of racialised mockery. Whereas the use of Somali was considered a source of deficiency and meaning-making for the Somali speaking children. I identify the common forms of translanguaging the children used in this setting depending on interlocuters, specific language ideologies and activities across space-time. Together, translanguaging and these factors produce heterogenous translanguaging spaces. I contend that the children translanguage by using varieties of Arabic and English to imagine and negotiate idealised gendered, racialised and generationed Muslimness. Developing these analyses, I suggest that translanguaging is simultaneously used to suggest asserted Muslimness and for including or excluding certain children from idealised Muslimness using ‘race’, language and generation. This study contributes to the academic conversations related to translanguaging, multilingualism, inclusions and exclusions in school settings and intersectionality as follows. I advance the complexity of translanguaging as an act of racialisation embedded within tension-filled contexts. I extend the concept of translanguaging spaces, highlighting how translanguaging shapes and is shaped by multiple activities and interlocutors across space-time. Further, I enrich intersectional analysis by offering insights into the complexity of young children’s Muslim identities and how they interlink with different social categories such as ‘race’, gender, language and generation

“Changing Places”: Travels Beyond the Anglo-American Campus Novel Genre

This thesis examines cultural and geographical limitations of the campus novel genre, proposing the study of global texts as alternative perspectives. Through analysis of critical studies of the genre, I argue that the campus novel is limited to studies of Anglo-American traditions, relegating global texts as marginal foreign variants. My research advocates further exploration of culturally and geographically diverse literary examples, considering their vitality and contemporaneity against the stagnant Anglo-American tradition. Chapter 1 identifies these limitations, through surveying the critical tradition of the campus novel genre. Chapter 2 presents an extensive overview of critical studies of campus novels beyond Britain and North America, thus contrasting their expanse against conspicuous absence in the critical tradition. To ensure systematic analysis of texts from diverse traditions, Chapter 2 also proposes the notion of kinship as connective framework, focusing on images of academic mobility as units of comparison between texts. The remaining chapters consider selected novels from various literary traditions, close-reading images of academic mobility and aspects of mobility such as motives, experiences, and endings of movement. Chapter 3 investigates survival and escape as motives for academic mobility in Alaa Al-Aswany’s Chicago and Diana Abu Jaber’s Crescent. Chapter 4 dissects social mobility and the tradition of academic mobility from Indonesia to Egypt, in the works of Habiburrahman El-Shirazy. The final chapter observes university return narratives – an image of mobility presently absent in studies of the genre. Examining Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Pengabdian (Submission) by Norsiah Abd. Gapar, returns are assessed in the context of student missions, exploring how canon diversity presents unique images of mobility, and reframes the genre. In essence, this thesis evaluates the significance of socio-historical conditions in modifying meanings of comparable images of academic mobility, offering alternative cultural, geographical, and methodological perspectives of the campus novel genre

The Role of Aesthetics in a Successful Logo Design

Logos are important; they grab consumers’ attention, make a strong first impression, and are a valuable visual representation of a brand. The visual appearance of logos is therefore important in terms of how they are viewed by consumers and how they influence consumer perceptions of the brand that the logos represent. The central question that is explored in this thesis is what visual attributes of a logo contribute to the logo’s aesthetic appeal and the approach taken is one that analyses data derived from consumer responses. The work described is therefore a collection of consumer-driven studies that use interviews, focus groups and surveys; the latter may be described as psychophysical experiments. The experimental part of the thesis is structured into three experimental chapters that describe 7 studies. In Chapter III, a set of focus groups and interviews collected information from consumers about logo aesthetics and some related concepts such as familiarity. Chapter IV includes two experiments where participants were asked to scale various logos in terms of visual attributes. The data from these experiments allowed a factor analysis that derived four main visual factors: vibrancy, simplicity, sophistication and balance, in order of deceasing share of the variance. These four factors can be considered to form a 4-D aesthetic space for logos. Chapter V describes cross-cultural studies of logo preference using a Likert scale and particularly explored the role of colour and whether a logo was a simple icon or had text. It was found that logos without an icon, consisting only of text, were perceived as being less preferred than logos with an icon. It was also found logos that were coloured were more preferred than logos that were achromatic or multicoloured

Towards an understanding of job matching using web data

The thesis explores the feasibility of using web data in labour research in general and of applying these data sources to the study of job matching in particular. Utilizing large-scale data sources, including web surveys and online job vacancies, the thesis aims to identify where the state of the art is and lay methodological, conceptual and analytical foundations for further exploration and research in the area. Formally, the thesis consists of five essays, which either have been or are on the way to be published in scientific journals

Examining social networking site narratives between government and youth on entrepreneurship : the case of relationship development in Egypt

Analysis of the ways in which SNS (Social Networking Sites) are used by governments, organisations and everyday users has over the past ten years been of significant interest to academic researchers. Part of this analysis of use has included understanding how in the Middle East, SNS were used in the series of anti-government protests known as the Arab Spring. Specifically, in Egypt, during the January 25 Revolution, a large number of youth users went on SNS such as Facebook to disseminate information, create conversations and raise awareness of their perspectives and concerns. Whilst use in protest and demonstration may result in aspects such as a drop in public trust of government agents, SNS could also contribute to significant relational outcomes such as relationship development and trust.This study takes Egypt as its foci in investigating the outcomes of SNS interaction between Government agencies and Youth users. This study aims to understand the role of the topic about which conversations are occurring in communicating with the citizens. Additionally, this study places emphasis on the role of the government agency in changing the perceptions of the Government through SNS interactions.This study contributes to the burgeoning domain of SNS studies by providing a non- traditional approach to its theoretical background. It specifically achieves this by adopting three areas of focus; first, SNS which includes a site and user perspective. Second, the political context which includes Marketing theory and government studies. Third, relationship development and trust which includes a multi theory lens into theorising the outcomes of SNS interactions. Therefore, it is the first study to apply Political Marketing Theory in Egypt in a non-electoral context. Using novel applications of Relationship Marketing and Public Relations theory, this study presents an understanding of the relationship orientation in the interaction between GOFE and Youth on SNS. Furthermore, the analysis regarding trust development in this study is developed through a framework that highlights both the users’ perspective of trust and the organisations' efforts towards achieving trust.This study adopts a social constructivist approach. Therefore, this investigation embraces qualitative inductive methods. Due to the rich culture and high interaction of the context investigated, the research problem at hand was addressed through the application of netnography. The Netnographic package includes; firstly, an online observation of Facebook pages followed by textual analysis. Secondly, it includes two sets of interviews with a sample of the users (i.e. Youth) and the organisations (i.e. GOFE). Using Thematic Analysis ten different themes were extracted from the three sources of data (i.e. Facebook data, GOFE interviews and Youth interviews).The findings from this study suggest that GOFE SNS representation is not yet mature. However, findings demonstrate that GOFE are in the process of becoming a generalisable model of government SNS representation. This could occur with the drop in control over engagement and movement to engagement strategies beyond those targeted primarily at publicity alone. Indeed, this study confirms the significant influence of SNS in fostering positive relational outcomes between the Government and Youth, while confirming the role of the topic and agency. These findings are discussed in light of theoretical contribution and practical implication to the government sector. Whereas previous studies have focused on one aspect of the communication process, this study is the first conducted in the public sector domain in Egypt that focuses on the observed behaviours of GOFE on SNS, perceived behaviours of GOFE by Youth and the strategic intent of GOFE by being present on SNS. This study concludes with limitations incurred and recommendations for practice and future studies. Finally, this study argues that with a further optimised SNS representation, there is indeed hope in developing relationships and achieving trust between Government and citizens in Egypt through SNS interaction

Home under siege: Bab al-Hara, televising morality and everyday life in the Levant

This PhD research investigates the role of television in representing the past and constructing an idealized society using a case study of a phenomenal Ramadan drama series, Bab el-Hara. The television drama, a Syrian production, was funded by the pan-Arab satellite conglomerate, the MBC group, and it is set in a fictitious Damascus of the 1930s under the French Mandate. The series, airing its seventh season in Ramadan, 2015, succeeded in achieving pan-Arab fame and gave a boost to the “Damascene Milieu” drama genre. The study approaches this television phenomenon ethnographically, looking at the fiction's implicatedness in the everyday life of viewers and makers in Damascus and in Beirut, through a multi-sited approach investigating content, context and agency, engaging in questions on space, morality and patriotism. The objective is to investigate audiences, text and makers as distinct yet connected sites of meaning. This context based analysis of Bab al-Hara takes place against the backdrop of 2010/2011; the liminal state of a Levant entering deeper into a complex local, regional and international power struggle. The everyday life of Bab al-Hara’s viewers was characterized by a general sense of loss and mistrust, and an unclear and threatened future. Contrastingly, Bab al-Hara provided the nostalgic promise of ontological security, grounded as it was in the courtyard houses of Old Damascus. The Damascene courtyard house constituted the spatial anchor for an idealized moral past, an ahistorical Damascusfocused Arab cultural history, and an imagination of the domestic as sovereign. It thus promoted a view of the neighbourly, the city and the country as a system based on kin, or the family, as the frame in which to understand the collectivity. Bab al-Hara's cultural, moral and spatial telos, a fusion of religious and nationalist worldviews, amongst others, is negotiated by Bab al-Hara’s viewers. The older generation, with situated experience of the social relations during the 1930s, and the younger generation that is appreciative of the virility of the “real” Bab al-Hara man that they no longer encounter in their everyday life. The multiple generational readings in regard to the absent idealized strength and authority, became a dominant reading in relation to chastity and unity as two idealized values that are necessary to conserve, but that are facing serious challenges in the everyday. Bab al-Hara idealizes a moral domestic society that is set in the past and it aims to advance a discourse on unity and patriotism. In so doing, however, it only exposes the weakness of the national project. The Syrian social upheaval in 2011 shows how unity and patriotism as the binaries to sectarianism and treason, have not succeeded in protecting the inner domain of the house from external invasions or internal divisions. In fact, accusations of treason, instead of forcing the outsider to the outside and building solidarity within, accentuates mistrust between the insiders and reveals the power and the limits of t h e Bab al-Hara imaginary of a kin based collectivity, and the omnipresence of imperialism