My first step into retrieving Donald Trump’s Tweets was accessing Brendan Brown’s Trump Twitter Archive. This website served as the basis to analyzing some of Trumps tweets and comparing the analysis I found with this website. This website also offers different archives of other tweeters, such as Hilary Clinton’s.
Using these steps, I was able to download Trump’s tweets from 2018-01-01 to 2018-04–06. Look below to see how it runs using google chrome.
In order to run it through the text analysis tools seen below, I needed to clean the tweets up. This required me to omit all numbers that had letters attached or anything that was not a tweet. All I would keep in my document is the text, otherwise it would not run through the test analysis tools properly or feed me results that were irrelevant.
Continuing to analyze his tweets I expect to come across many topics that will include; immigrants, fake news, Mexico, the wall, and other highly controversial topics. I will also be interested in the formality of his writing, by analyzing the words per sentence. Using the analytical style that Ahmadian et al use to analyze Trump’s speeches (2017). Using this method, will show the unorthodox use of Twitter to spew out his ideas as the president of the US. Using the most accessible and open tool, which is Voyant, I will analyze some of Trump tweets. There are many tools that can be used.
Voyant
I first uploaded the tweets to Voyant and this is what my results were.
This is a word cloud, which shows the most frequently occuring words in the document/corpus. This provides an overview of the content. You get a gist of what he likes to tweet the most about. The most frequent word he uses is “great”, so probably about how great he can make America again.
This is great to see what he most frequently tweets about. One topic that has been prominent in the news in DACA, which is evident here as its a hot topic for him as well. “Democrats” is another prominent word that appears large, he has a lot to say about his opponent often. This provides a preview of what he tweets about in 2018 so far.
For example one of the word’s I’m interested in is “wall”, which appears 42 times in this document. It is one of the bigger words that appear in the centre to the left of the word “president”.
Click here to look through all the tweets with “wall”.
Looking at the first two tweets that contain the word “wall” is interesting because they are outrageous. This part of Voyant allows you to go through each tweet that has that word to get the context of it. Looking at these tweets Trump does not understand how “strong” borders work. It is not a physical structure that makes Canada and Mexico borders strong, but their immigration laws as Trump states. I find this funny because he is persistent on the need for a wall, although he states himself that what needs to change are the laws. Looking down the list, you can see very familiar words that revolve around the border, Mexico, and money. It has been one of the more popular topics of interest for Trump and people.
One can look through the most prominent words and analyze everything that is mentioned about that. Often the words surround the same topic, as he has strong opinions and does not change them often.
Overall this text analysis tool offers visual components, which helps in distant reading. I have taken a distant-close reading, where I first do the analysis and then look closer into the results to analyze them further. Using text analysis tools can be very helpful in analyzing large corpus or in this case tweets.
I hope to create a more in-depth analysis of his tweets in the future with more time and use more then one tool.
Text Analysis and Donald Trump 