The text and images of the gopdebate: what the public is "talking" about on instagram

The richness of Instagram data makes it possible to tell a compelling story about the public’s “talk” on Instagram. Our work focuses on the use of Instagram by citizens to express their thoughts on the 2016 GOP presidential election. We collected Instagram posts with the hashtags #GOPDebate and #GOPDebates for five months. Using topic-modeling and sentiment analysis techniques to analyze both textual (post captions) and visual (images) attributes we are able to illustrate the topical network of political discussions and actors whom the public talks about on each topic. Our work contributes to literature on the role of social media, and specifically Instagram, in the political domain. The methodology also demonstrates how textual and visual attributes can be used together to categorize photo content