Social Media Storytelling on the Appalachian Trail

ORGANIZATION

CS Department

EXHIBITORS

Kelly Ervin, College of Engineering, Computer Science
Julia Nguyen, College of Engineering, Computer Science
Scott McCrickard, College of Engineering, Computer Science
Lindah Kotut, College of Engineering, Computer Science

WHAT HAPPENS HERE?

Social media is great for sharing pieces of our lives, but it is often difficult to see the big picture. This project provides interactive visualizations of social media posts about the Appalachian Trail. These allow users to explore what happens along the trail and reminisce on their experiences.

WHAT WAS THE PROCESS?

All posts on the r/AppalachianTrail subreddit and all public Instagram and Twitter posts containing the hashtag #AppalachianTrail from 2019 were scraped for this project. Data was aggregated into JSON format, then the text portion of each post was cleaned and analyzed using python scripts. Where post location was unavailable, appropriate locations were determined based on post text. All visualizations were created using HTML/CSS and Javascript (D3). Learn more.

PROJECT