The Measurer Of University Subreddit Sentiment, or MoUSS, is a tool that collects, analyzes, and compares the sentiment of posts in the subreddits across various prestigious American universities. It was designed to fulfill a final project requirement for Big Data Analytics (CIS 5450) in the Fall 2022 semester at the University of Pennsylvania.
Imagined and designed by Tasneem Pathan, Christine Ngugi, and Matthew Pickering.
One of the most common questions on the University of Pennsylvania's subreddit r/upenn from prospective applicants and recently admitted students is, "Is UPenn really as bad is it seems?" The question is a result of rather frequent rant and advice posts that seem to communicate an overall feeling of hopelessness:
Qualitatively, these posts are quite common, so prospetive members of the Penn community are frequently prompted to question if these feelings are the norm.
We set out to answer exactlty the question set out above: "Is the culture of a University's subreddit representative of the culture of that University itself?" We seek to answer this question through three lenses:
- Do the frequent topics of discussion on the subreddit represent the popular topics of the university itself?
- Does similarity between a pair of universities' subreddits imply the universities themselves are similar?
- Does the sentiment of a university's subreddit imply the university itself has worse mental health outcomes?
The notebooks corresponding to each of the above questions are:
Note that all notebooks were originally built and ran in Google Colab, so it uses Google's Colab environment and is built upon mounting a particular Google Drive for file access.
Rawr.py is a wrapper around the Python Reddit API Wrapper (PRAW), hence called the Reddit API Wrapper wRapper. It contains all the code necessary to get the used data from the schools used for study. It provides the Objects representing Subreddits, Submissions, Comments, and Awards along with methods required to scrape each one.