Mapping feminicide data on Twitter using text mining and lexicon analysis 

Helena Suárez Val and Zofia Bednarowska-Michaiel are running the CIM Research Workshop, where they will discuss text mining, visual analysis, and lexicon analysis to analyse Twitter data on feminicide.

Research

Feminicide (femicide) is the name for deadly gender-related violence against women (Lagarde y de los Ríos 2010) omnipresent across the world. Recently it was widely discussed in the UK as part of the “End Feminicide” campaign: “stalking, coercive control and pornography lie behind so many of the killings of 272 young women in 10 years” (The Guardian, 2021). In order to raise visibility of this issue, feminist activists collect, visualise and circulate feminicide data for their regions, later shared in social media. In the UK there is the Femicide Census, while Helena collects feminicide data for Uruguay as a part of her activism. The question is: do these data practices contribute to ending violence against women?

Methods

During the workshop we will investigate what emotions and actions are related to feminicide data, by looking at the textual and visual data. Using computational text analysis and qualitative analysis we will explore if and how these different approaches complement each other. Text mining techniques will be confronted with the interpretive approach to the analysis of images derived from lexicon analysis, which is a method that can be used as part of situational analytics (Marres 2018; 2020; Marres et al. 2020).

Shall you have any questions, please contact the organisers: Helena and Zofia