Sentiment analysis for GIS education

About the Project

As data literacy competencies become more common in university-level curriculum, understanding how students are really feeling when they first encounter new software and data concepts is of increasing importance to student success. Using sentiment analysis, this project sought to understand students’ reactions, or sentiments, to using ArcGIS and geospatial data in a university classroom environment and how those reactions evolve as more experience is gained.

Over the course of three weeks and six workshops, I taught students how to use ArcGIS in order for them to complete course assignments. Each week the librarian provided a form that included two free-text response questions.

The VADER sentiment analysis tool was applied to all text responses, rating each response with a compound score on a scale between þ1 (positive sentiment) and –1 (negative sentiment). The analysis showed that the range of respondent sentiment narrowed throughout the three weeks.

I presented the project at the IASSIST 2019 conference in Sydney, Australia, and published a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Map and Geography Libraries in 2020.

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