Repeatable measurement of Twitter user impact NASA and the great American Eclipse of 2017

Abstract

NASA is viewed as part of the frontier of human knowledge by several generations, and is relied upon to educate the public on astronomical matters. For decades NASA has provided not only North America but the entire world with information and events pertaining to our Universe and beyond. With the Great American Eclipse of 2017, NASA?s production was crucial to the general public?s awareness and understanding of the event. To date, it may have been NASA?s largest production of an event spanning many social media platforms and hundreds of Media outlets. With the eruption of data mining avenues and techniques available, being able to study and quantify such major events from a ?reach? perspective has become of utmost importance for many of the groups involved. Our goal with this paper is to understand how the public perceived the social media coverage that NASA had provided, specifically in the world of Twitter, a free social networking microblogging service that allows registered members to broadcast short posts called tweets. We accomplish this through sentiment analysis and the spotting of trends within Twitter data. Furthermore, we follow a framework of study that allows simple and cost-effective analysis of discrete events of arbitrary nature.