Select a sample of social media content (from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, or any other social media platform with which you are familiar and that is substantially/primarily text rather than images) that consists of at least 10 posts, tweets, or comments totaling at least 250 words. You may do this by simply copying and pasting posts from a web browser, or by using R (or another tool) to grab a sample (a screenshot is OK too but will limit your options for analysis). Choose an analytic strategy: you might hand-code, read holistically, use comments in Word, use software such as Atlas,ti, or calculate sentiment or other attributes using R (or another tool).

The content analysis assignment will have three products for submission:

1. A memo of around 750 words describing what you wanted to know or thought you might find, how you chose your sample and why, what you found (be thoughtful about how or whether your findings are generalizable), and how you might improve on it in further research.

2. The text you analyzed.

3. Documentation/representation of your coding/analytic strategy.

This may be combined with 2, for example, you might list everything in a Word document with all of the text and the comments where you’re making notes about it, or output from R that includes both the text of tweets you analyzed and their sentiment score, etc. If utilizing the ouput from R, scan and upload.