Spatial-temporal Analysis of Emotions in Society in News

Spatial-temporal analysis of emotions in society has become popular in many studies integrating geography with the humanities, and has shown its influence on social sensing and geo-computation for social sciences. Emotions in society are often volatile, irrational, and vulnerable to the social environment. A critical challenge is to analyze changes in long-term and large-scale emotions in society. In this paper, we propose exploiting this challenge by using spatial-temporal analysis. After extracting emotional, temporal, and spatial information, a spatial standardization approach based on adataset of administrative district changes addresses the problem of Chinese toponym changes. Finally, over 1.7 million news data from the People' s Daily from 1956 to 2014 were collected to explore the changes, spatial distribution, and driving factors of emotions in society using spatial-temporal analysis. The experimental results found that the spatial-temporal analysis of emotions in society in the news is consistent with the results of related sociological research.