My Body My Choice

The project gathers tweets with the hashtag #mybodymychoice from various years in order to understand how the hashtag has evolved from its beginnings into the present day of the pandemic. While we hypothesize that the hashtag was originally created to advocate for women’s rights, the hashtag now often perpetuates coronavirus vaccine misinformation. For the project, we are gathering a 2020-present dataset of tweets that use the hashtag and then also gathering an earlier dataset that includes tweets from the hashtag’s beginnings. By topic modeling the tweets, we will understand how the hashtag has evolved over time. In addition, we are exploring how users that include the hashtag in their tweets have evolved over time as the meaning of the tweet has evolved. Our end goal is to create a web application that allows users to explore how the hashtag has evolved.

Contributors to this project include Ashley Champagne (CDS Lead), Justin Uhr