Reading The Room

Exploring the intersection of social media and politics.

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Welcome to Reading the Room, an exploration of how U.S. presidents use Twitter to communicate sentiment and signal geopolitical focus. By analyzing thousands of tweets, we can detect patterns in tone, timing, and messaging.

See our write-up here and our codebase here.

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Tweet Sentiment Analysis 😊😐🙁

Our analysis focuses on a very large dataset of tweets (over 45,000!). Our dataset contains all of Barack Obama's tweets from his 2013-2017 term and all of Donald Trump's tweets from his 2017-2021 term.

We classify each tweet using NLP based on its overall sentiment. The model (VADER) rates each tweet on a scale of -1 (very negative) to 1 (very positive).

👉 How to explore:

  • Use the search bar to filter tweets by keyword (e.g., "Covid", "Russia", "jobs").
  • Matching tweets are highlighted on the graph and shown in the sidebar.
  • Below the search bar, the top 10 words from matching tweets appear — click any to start a new search.
  • You can also toggle event markers to view key political moments by cliking "Show Events." Click on an event dot to see more details.

Obama Tweets

Trump Tweets

Key Events - Click to see more details

Average Sentiment

Trump:       Obama:

What countries do President's mention most? 🌎

Our second visualization highlights how often U.S. presidents mentioned foreign countries in their tweets. This offers a window into each administration's diplomatic priorities and areas of geopolitical focus.

👉 How to explore:

  • Click on a country from the dropdown to see how frequently it was mentioned by a president over time.
  • Use the filters above to narrow results by president or year.
  • The right-hand panel displays background context about U.S. relations with the selected country, as well as quick stats on the number of times the country was mentioned.

Thanks for exploring Reading the Room. We hope this project has shed light on how presidential communication has evolved in the age of social media — and what it reveals about leadership, tone, and global focus.

Created by Chase Preston, Hannah Alborzi, Huda Marta, and Alexander Liu.