project

Breaking the Bubble: Investigating Echo Chambers and Sentiment in Online Discourse

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In today’s digital age, social media platforms have become powerful tools for expressing opinions and beliefs. I am excited to announce the launch of my new project, where I will be delving into fascinating topics related to online discourse.

One area of focus will be YouTube, one of the most popular video-sharing websites, and the evaluation of views presented on this platform. Research has shown that users not only engage with the content they see, but also with the opinions of others, often leading to the formation of echo chambers where similar ideas and perspectives dominate.

To gain deeper insights into people’s thoughts and beliefs, I will be employing sentiment analysis techniques. In a recent article, I conducted an analysis on the most-watched video of Jordan Peterson from British GQ, which garnered over 60 million views. Using natural language processing (TextBlob) and machine learning algorithms, I analyzed 30,000 comments with the most likes.

The results revealed that the majority of comments were neutral in terms of polarity, indicating a lack of clear positive or negative sentiment. Furthermore, they were not necessarily subjective. Upon manual tagging, it was found that 88 comments expressed support for Peterson, while one supported the interviewer.

This pilot study sheds light on the existence of echo chambers in online discourse, where individuals may disregard important ideas or suppress dissenting voices due to their own reinforcing beliefs. I will also explore methods to enhance the accuracy of sentiment analysis, such as incorporating libraries like VADER or SENTIWORDNET to improve precision when tagging content.

Stay tuned as I share the primary dataset and additional resources used in my analysis.

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Breaking the Bubble: Investigating Echo Chambers and Sentiment in Online Discourse

Neshaani URL Shortener

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I enjoy being involved in side projects. I believe the benefits far outweigh the time invested in them. So I was contemplating one that would allow me to delve into as many diverse yet interconnected areas as possible. I thought, what was better than a short and functional project like a URL Shortener. It could simply be very simple (as it is right now) or very sophisticated in its’ future.

neshaani-sq-logo

Neshaani (which means Address in Persian) is an open-source URL Shortener that’s backed up by its’ own API, hosted on github and is using the Slim Micro framework for Php. Pulling in Laravel was sort of an overkill for the scale of the project and although I knew there would be challenges ahead setting things up with Slim, I took it as an opportunity to learn more about this concise framework.

The goal was to build an API that’s extensible and fast, even if that’s reinventing the wheel, to some degree. I had the opportunity to learn a ton, to get to know more about APIs, manage another droplet on DigitalOcean, setting up Let’s Encrypt on it and brush up on other stuff like rebasing in Git and many more.

Last but not least, Neshaani is still a work in progress. I think I’d add a NodeJS based client to it and implement it using a NoSQL database (most probably MongoDB) in the coming weeks.

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Neshaani URL Shortener

TodoJS

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todojs-logo

JavaScript is enjoyable, intuitive and the community it’s got is astoundingly huge. For long, I’ve been busy building stuff with Php, which I still do and to me, JavaScript was just a handy-dandy tool to add some spice to the project. Nothing huge. And how I’ve been missing out on all the joy there was.

Sometimes the hard part is just getting going. So I thought the best way to start would be for me to create a little something using the tools like NodeJS, Express, and so forth and see how it goes.

TodoJS

TodoJS turned out to be the palpable evidence that made me realise how little I knew about the veracity of all that hype. Feel free to have a look.

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TodoJS

iPasteBin

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ipastebin

iPasteBin is yet another simple paste tool based on the Laravel Framework. The project really came about as a result of me needing an incentive to get involved with open source software and brush up on my front and back-end skills. While it is still at its’ primitive level, it can handle the following tasks:

  • Provide the visitor with a large input box.
  • Save the snippet to the database.
  • Redirect the user to a custom URI by which they could share their note.

There are of course a lot to be done but for now I think it is something to begin with.

You can check it out at: https://behnum.github.io/iPasteBin/

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iPasteBin

Bilingual UI

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During the course of working on MedixCo,  which is a not-so-large project that was desired to be available in two languages, Persian (as the primary one) and English, I realised how challenging it is to design a bilingual user interface. Along with having a simple UI is was intended to be fast and responsive.

Despite the fact that almost all of the back-end development  was a cinch, thanks to the Laravel Framework, there was still one thing I had to decide on, which was about the way the owner could administrate the content. Whether to redirect him to separate admin areas (per language) or to present everything there was via a single area (the problem being content direction, RTL/LTR). So as I didn’t really relish the fact that while most of the things were going to be identical and sort of duplicated on both sides, the admin had to switch between different panels and therefore I went for the latter option and combined the two.

Now, I’d say it turned out pretty well. While most of the features are fully configurable, everything is properly within reach and the admin won’t need to go back and forth to different pages to target the desired version of the website.

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Bilingual UI

AtlasFarab.co is live

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After several iterations, I’m happy to have my latest project up and running. Atlas Farab Engineering Group is a professional company founded in 2001. Their services to customers have been Project Management Consultancy, Procurement, Supply and Construction within Oil & Gas, Petrochemical, Water & Waste Water Treatment Plants and Industrial and Non-Industrial buildings in the electrical and mechanical fields.

The project was comprised of several different phases and areas including Front-end and Back-end development, Logo and graphic design and Photography. Feel free to checkout my photography portfolio at: behnum.com or follow me on instagram @behnum.

Visit Atlasfarab.co

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AtlasFarab.co is live