Evaluating the online discourse on Norway’s engagement in the Columbian peace negotiations

Challenge

Norad evaluates Norway’s foreign political engagements and wanted to evaluate Norway’s engagement in the Columbian peace negotiations. A part of this evaluation would be to evaluate the online public discourse concerning the Norway’s engagement.

Approach

Norad needed specific insights into the overall key topics in the public discourse as well as the attitude towards their engagement in general. Norad also needed to gain a thorough understanding of which key actors that was influencing the public discourse, and how the different actors related to each other on various key topics.

Resolution

By analyzing five years of Twitter-data using Natural Language Processing, Epinion gave Norad essential insights. Specifically, Epinion did a sentiment-analysis that showed the attitude towards Norway was neutral in the beginning but grew increasingly positive. Using keyword extraction, we identified the key topics, and lastly using network analysis, we identified the top influencers.