Group tracks use of racist terms on Twitter by geography

http://nbclatino.com/2013/05/13/geography-of-hate-looks-at-use-of-racist-terms-against-latinos-blacks-on-twitter/?__hstc=223762052.cfe9e1f1cf7b5c0f63d116cef9b93324.1368575348157.1368575348157.1368575348157.1&__hssc=223762052.1.1368575348157

The group looked at geotagged Tweets from June 2012 to April 2013 and students at Humboldt State University manually read and identified the sentiment of each tweet to determine if a specific word was used in a positive, negative or neutral way. Altogether 150,000 tweets were found to be negative.

Floating Sheep looked for the use of words like “wetback” and “spic” to analyze negative racial sentiment aimed at Hispanics or immigrants, with the former being the slur that was used by most users out of the two.

“Ultimately, this term is used most in different areas of Texas, showing the state’s centrality to debates about immigration in the U.S.,” the authors wrote in a blog post. “But the areas with significant concentrations aren’t necessarily that close to the border, and neither do other border states who feature prominently in debates about immigration contain significant concentrations.”