These are slides from a recent webinar hosted by UMBC with the help of Keegan Hines.

The growth of social media over the last decade has revolutionized the way individuals interact and industries conduct business. Individuals produce data at an unprecedented rate by interacting, sharing, and consuming content through social media. However, analyzing this ever-growing pile of data is quite tricky and, if done erroneously, could lead to wrong inferences.

These slides provide, by example, insights to mining social media data and exposing underlying latent structures relating to ideology and sentiment as well as space and time. This work respectfully explores the rather socially critical and sensitive topic in and around the tragic events of the Newtown Shootings and gun control in America.