Abstract
Sentiments measured properly always give direction to future occurrences. Without an expression through feelings plus sensitive statements, it would be difficult to predict future occurrence. But when feelings are expressed through spoken languages or written texts, a projection of future event can be evaluated to an extent. Nigeria is blessed with intellectuals and over 48% of the population are actively involved in social media. The beauty of this great nation is in its diversity and practice of democracy. Since independence, they have experienced variations in handling their hard-earned democracy. The goal of this paper is to compare analyzed sentiments from the Nigerian people across the 6 geopolitical zones and the aftermath of the Nigerian election in 2019. Data is retrieved from the social media using python programming language across 2 major platforms twitter and Facebook. A word cloud is introduced later to differentiate various sentiments using a spiral loop to map the various artifacts into corpora. Vader machine learning system called Sentiment Intensity Analyzer was used to the analyze each statement to retrieve positive and negative sentiments. This study employs two methodologies, quantitative and qualitative methods with significant levels of descriptive approach in data analysis. The researchers explore the results of the analysis to verify whether significant decisions can be made in the future from data generated from social media, using the 2019 Nigerian election as a case study. A dashboard was developed to plot the different feelings and how they influenced the general election outcome. PHP and JavaScript were used to achieve this. It is recommended that stakeholders in the ‘digital humanities and arts’ explore the findings in this paper especially if the result comes at least close to 80% of the real result.
Highlights
Mining large body of collective thoughts can prove to be one potentially powerful method of gauging public sentiment on any number of topical areas
The 2019 general election in Nigeria differs from the previous elections in the Fourth Republic (1999date)
Yiaga Africa differed on their explanation to the cause as they attributed the low turnout to be caused by the growing sense of disconnect between the Nigerian people and the political elite [3]
Summary
Mining large body of collective thoughts can prove to be one potentially powerful method of gauging public sentiment on any number of topical areas. The 2019 general election in Nigeria differs from the previous elections in the Fourth Republic (1999date). An article titled “Data: Nigeria's Presidential election records lowest voter Turnout in 20 Years” by Sahara reporters tries to corroborate the information in a more detailed fashion. They likened the situation to have been caused by initial cancellation of the 2019 polls earlier scheduled for February 16, 2019, with an eventual rescheduling for February 23, 2019 [2]. Yiaga Africa differed on their explanation to the cause as they attributed the low turnout to be caused by the growing sense of disconnect between the Nigerian people and the political elite [3]
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