Katherine Simeon | Every voice matters: An analysis of @WeAreRLadies | RStudio (2020)
As a rotating curation, @WeAreRLadies is a twitter account that has a different curator (i.e., tweeter) each week with a mission to highlight female and minority genders and their work in R. So far, curators have tweeted from 18 different countries and represent a variety of domains and levels of R expertise, ranging from R novices to those developing their own packages. With 45 R-Ladies curators to date, the account has become a popular R-related twitter resource, gaining more than 13,000 followers in the past year and hundreds of interactions each week. This talk will present a text analysis and reflection on over a year of Twitter text data from @WeAreRLadies. As the founder and maintainer of this account, I witness firsthand the bidirectional relationship between one’s learning journey and their use of R. In this talk, I will attempt to quantify this through a text analysis that explores how one’s experiences learning and using R relates to how they talk (or tweet) about it. By analyzing tweet text as well as other metrics provided by twitter (e.g., number of likes, replies, and clicks), I will showcase different ways curators have engaged with the R Twitter community and explore how account engagement has changed as the number of curators and followers continue to grow. I will also discuss how curators’ different areas of expertise have resulted in tweets and discussions that both demonstrate the variety of tools available in R, and spotlight unifying ideas and best practices in R programming. Finally, I will reflect on lessons learned and future directions for @WeAreRLadies, as well as its contribution to the R-Ladies Global initiative. Overall, this talk will discuss how diverse perspectives of @WeAreRLadies curators have enriched the conversations in the R Twitter community by validating different learning journeys and by promoting and amplifying underrepresented voices. A 5-minute presentation in our Lightning Talks series
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Hi, everyone. I'm Catherine. I'm really excited to talk to you today about WeAreRLadies, which is the ROKR for RLadies Global. What is a ROKR, you ask? Good question. A ROKR is a rotating curation account, which means that there's a rotating spokesperson for a given social media account. And this is pretty intuitive for an organization like RLadies, because we have 180 plus chapters worldwide, and there are so many awesome people doing such amazing things. So every week, we have a different person curate or tweet from WeAreRLadies. They discuss their experiences, they discuss how they use R, and maybe some tips and tricks along the way.
Since this account started in August 2018, we've gained 15,000 plus followers. We've had 56 awesome curators across 19 different countries. And hopefully, there's more to come in 2020. This picture on the left is actually our very first tweet from our first curator ever, which was Mara Averick.
What makes the account special
So if we look at the most frequently used words from tweets in this account, you'll see that it looks very similar to what you might see on the rstats hashtag, things like data, package, code. However, for every technical topic that we speak about, curators are really generous about talking about their experiences. They're talking about what they love, their community, their learning journeys. And I think this is really what makes this account special. And for me, at least, it's very similar to what I might experience at my local RLadies chapter.
Here is the most liked tweet of our account thus far. And I think it's a little bit of both. It's explaining the package praise, which got also a shout out this morning at Jenny Bryan's keynote. And it's just a fun package that people are really excited to learn about. However, not everything is fun, right? Our experiences are not only the fun stuff, but also the things that might be frustrating about R. And we're all learning together, and no one seems to be an expert. So even our curators have questions. One tweet that I really liked was from Sina, and she talked about her frustration installing RCPP parallel. And basically every reply to this tweet was, I'm so glad I'm not alone.
I'm so glad I'm not alone.
Sentiment analysis
So if we look at a really quick sentiment analysis of all of the tweets on this account, we have the most negatively charged words on the left and the most positively charged words on the right. We're a pretty positive group, I would say. There are things that are negative about the tweets in our account, primarily driven by, like, evil plots. Things like tricks and regression. Really, really negative. Conversely, things that are positive is mainly because we love talking about things that are shiny. So it's really interesting what comes up when we do a sentiment analysis on this. But some of this jargon aside, we're still talking about issues, get related or not, mistakes and difficulties. And in a Twitter world where everyone seems like a superstar, this has been really comforting to me and made the Twitter community a little bit more accessible.
In the 2700 tweets that are currently in this dataset, which doesn't even include anyone this year, we've had about 400 plus questions and counting. Maybe there's a little bit more. This was a quick regular expression looking at all of the tweets that contained question marks. And basically we're seeing that everyone's asking questions, whether they're a student or a senior data scientist. And these questions aren't only just about our confusions. They're also just engaging conversation, which I think is really, really awesome.
One tweet that I really love from my friend Kaylin, she asked people what they love about data science and or statistics. And she also just gave her response to this question as well. And the replies from this tweet were just really, really awesome and really, really encouraging for someone who might be new to the field.
A shameless plug
So I just want to end with maybe a shameless plug. If you aren't following We Are Our Ladies, in my unbiased opinion, I think it's worth following. And if you are interested, please just consider curating for We Are Our Ladies. It doesn't matter whether you're a beginner or whether you've been through the ringer with R, we're all learning together and everyone's perspective is valuable. And this is something that I really have found to ring true from having to read every single tweet on this account.
we're all learning together and everyone's perspective is valuable.
So I just also want to close quickly with some acknowledgements. There's a lot of great people who make this Roker happen. Particularly a huge thank you to the curators that make it worth following week after week. Thank you so much.
