A (Short) History of Social Media Sentiment Analysis

In this chapter, we introduce the concept of sentiment analysis as a way to study the prevalence of positive or negative sentiments in expressed attitudes and opinions. We review the ways researchers broadly have used sentiment analyses of Twitter data and other digital data and the established benefits and limits of this method for urban social science research. We then discuss how Twitter data and other similar forms of social media data have been applied in a wide variety of urban planning issues and projects across the globe.