COMP598 Final Project Solution

Overview
Your team has been hired by a not-for-profit that wants to understand candidate discussion in the days following the US election. They have indicated that they are especially concerned with perceptions of election legitimacy. Specifically, they want to know:
1. The salient topics discussed around each candidate and what each topic primarily concerned
2. Relative engagement with those topics among liberals and conservatives
You will conduct this analysis and submit an 8-10 (double-spaced) page report discussing your findings.
Analysis Details
Your analysis will draw on the Reddit posts (not comments) from two subreddits: /r/politics and /r/conservative. While not perfect, these have been found to roughly line up with liberal and conservative US communities.
To inform your analysis, you should collect 1,000 posts from each over a 3 day period. Keep only posts that mention either Trump or Biden. Of these, conduct an open coding on 200 posts to develop the topics (approach the exercise requiring each post to belong to exactly one topic). You should aim for between 3-8 topics in total.
Once your topics have been designed, manually annotate the rest of the candidate-mentioning posts in your dataset. While double annotation would usually be used, for this project (given time constraints), single annotation will be sufficient.
Characterize your topics by computing the 10 words in each category with the highest tf-idf scores (to compute inverse document frequency, use all 2,000 posts that you originally collected).
Report Details
Your report should be written entirely in paragraph-form, Arial 11pt font, 1-inch margins, double line spacing. It should have the following sections (the lengths are suggestions):
1. Overview (0.5 page) - Key findings
2. Data (1 page) – describe your dataset. This should include statistics relevant to the project – the number of posts you originally started with, the number of Trump and Biden posts you had post filtering, and any design decisions you had to make around the filtering of this content.
3. Methods (1 page) - explanation and justification for what you did. Focus on the design decisions you made NOT listed in this document that impacted your results.
4. Results (2 pages) - share all your findings including the topics selected (and their definitions), topic characterization, and topic engagement.
5. Discussion (2 pages) - interpret your results in terms of what they reveal about the way each candidate was being discussed and perceived. Make extensive use of your results to justify your interpretations.
6. Group Member contributions (0.5 page) - a description of the contributions each group member made to this project.
7. References (< 1 page) - this is an optional section should you reference other works in your report.

Fine Print
● While there are no rules about how work should be divided up, good team participation and fair sharing the workload are absolutely expected parts of this project.
Evaluation Rubric
Criteria Points (100 in total) Details
Style 10 Is the text written in a clear, concise way? Is good grammar and spelling employed throughout?
Data collection correctness 10 Was the dataset prepared correctly? Did it have baseline characteristics that would allow this study to deliver meaningful insights?
Topic design validity 15 Was a process followed that would produce valid topics? Insufficient details should be treated the same as if something was not done.
Topic validity 15 Are the topics appropriate to the task? Are they well-defined? Are they defined to minimize subjectivity?
Annotation quality 10 Does the annotation process give us confidence in the quality of the annotations?
Results 20 Are all results requested present? Do the results make sense? Are outliers or unusual trends appropriately explained?
Findings 20 Are insightful candidate-level interpretations provided? Are these grounded in results? Do the findings integrate results and prior knowledge in a sound, wellreasoned way?