Introduction
As we know, everyone’s plans drastically changed this year due to the worldwide spread of Covid-19. For my final project, I knew that I wanted to focus on analyzing something related to the virus as it has affected everyone in some way. Thinking about it further, I realized that this virus has changed the way many of us are working, whether it be for our jobs or for school. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined having my senior year being so different than what I had expected it to be, with classes being all online. Therefore, I chose to research the hashtag #workfromhome. I believe that tracking #workfromhome will show a pattern about how people have approached working from home nowadays and how Covid-19 has impacted people’s work and affected their sense of wellbeing.
Geomaps
For this project I utilized Twitter’s Application Programming Interfaces (API) to collect the tweets that included the hashtag #workfromhome. I specified the number of tweets I wanted to collect to 50,000 tweets to hopefully get an accurate representation of the hashtag. However, when I ran the code only 17,496 tweets were generated, which brought up a limitation that might make the data less representative. Other limitations include the limits Twitter API has as well as the number of available tweets specified to what I was looking for. In addition, historical tweets, meaning tweets from just days ago, become unavailable, which might make my data less representative as well. With all of the tweets that I collected, I was able to generate two geomaps that show the location of all of the tweets that include #workfromhome.
Map 1
As you can see from the first interactive map, the blue dots represent all the tweets that include the hashtag #workfromhome. These tweets are seen posted all around the globe which comes as no surprise since this virus has become so widespread and required many to work from their homes.
Map 2
This second map includes both the user profile images and the actual tweets from each user if you click on their image.
Working From Home Wordcloud
After generating the tweets from the Twitter API, I found that there was a lot of data that could be interpreted from both the tweets and the geomaps and word cloud. To begin, I first took a look at the tweets found in r. I specifically focused on the text and hashtag columns and noticed a pattern which included most recently the words “hiring”, “partnered”, “job applications”, “remote” and “apply”. All of these words make sense being grouped together. The virus has not only impacted and changed where or how people have worked, but has also resulted in many people losing their jobs, therefore it would make sense that people would be searching for new work. When taking a look at the second geomap, map 2, I clicked on the user profiles and read their tweets to get a sense on their feelings about the pandemic. Surprisingly the majority of the tweets seemed to carry a positive sentiment. Many of the tweets were humorous in nature and gave off the impression that people were content in their homes where they’d be safe from the virus. Moreover, some of the tweets included messages of remaining positive during these times and how their pets were their new coworkers. Although it is obvious that everyone would much rather live in a world where they can freely go to their office for work or be in a classroom while learning, it seems people are generally making the best out of this situation and have learned to adapt to it.
The last visualization I generated was a word cloud, which was made by processing all of the tweets and filtering the most frequently used words in the same tweets. The top ten words that were reported, excluding two “nonsense” words, were “workfromhome”, “business”, “jobs”, “home”, “sales”, “money”, “learn” and “free”. These words come as no surprise when observing patterns as they can again be related back to how Covid-19 has impacted where and how people are now working. Many businesses, mainly businesses in retail and service, suffered financially since these businesses were unable to sell any of their goods and services during the lockdown. As I reflected more about the frequently used words I took a new look at how the word “sales” fit in the tweets. I knew that sales, even before the pandemic, was a career that employers could work from the comfort of their own home, which brought up the question if the word “sales” was really related to what I was looking to analyze. It turns out my suspicions were right. While all of the other frequently used words were tweeted by a source from an app or job companies specialized in finding remote work, a majority of the sales tweets were sent by a robot under a source called TorivoJonretweetbot, meaning most likely these were an advertisement for remote work even before the pandemic. In addition I saw that the hashtag #sales was also grouped with the hashtag #MBA which presumably was used to advertise a Master’s degree in sales.
In summary, I believe that many people have become adjusted to working from home and have found to some degree a sense of contentment working from home since the pandemic hit. However, the data that was presented also reveals the reality that many people have lost their jobs due to the virus and are currently unemployed, which explains how many recent tweets revolve around business and job hirings. Some of the limitations on the data and the analyses include, as I stated before, the limits regarding Twitter’s API and how many tweets are actually available. Another limitation proved to include historical tweets and the fact that past tweets are not available with the free Twitter API version. Since Twitter API contains data that happens in real-time, historical tweets definitely provide a limitation since we cannot see #workfromhome tweets from as little as five days ago to as far back as March when the pandemic became more of a threat in the United States. Although the tweets I analyzed now seem to be more positive in nature, the attitude of earlier tweets sent by people could have been completely different since people have had time to adjust to this new environment. In the beginning and definitely still today people remain anxious about Covid-19 in terms of what next year will look like. However, things are looking more hopeful since a vaccine is scheduled to come out this month. With that news, perhaps maybe someday soon we will not have to work from home.