Maddison Willetts - From Modern Tweets to Victorian Broadsheets

N8 CIR Summer Intern Maddison Willets talks about her experience of the programme and how she will use the work in her final-year dissertation. Many existing digital tools for sentiment analysis are built with a modern sentiment lexicon (a dictionary of lexical items labelled with sentiment scores like positive, neutral, and negative) and require knowledge of a programming language. Reliance on a modern sentiment lexicon results in the exclusion of context-specific or evolving terms meaning that researchers interested in a specific historical period, literary genre, or form are often unable to tailor their analysis to their research material. To provide a digital solution to this problem, I developed a prototype sentiment analysis software that allows users to customise and compare lexicons for sentiment analysis tailored to the user’s research material. Learn more about Maddison's research on our website: https://n8cir.org.uk/internships/inte...