Mapping emotions in social media and the press: A spatialised analysis of emotional references to mobility in Belgian towns

Mentalechta, Lucie;Mac Donough, Marie;Cougnon, Louise-Amélie
(2025) The Politics of Emotion: Affect, Identity and Power — Location: London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, England (12.July.2025)

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Mobility issues play a crucial role from an environmental perspective because their representations in the media and their reception by citizens influence attitudes and opinions of the population. In Wallonia (Belgium), where large towns intimately alternate with small cities and villages, issues related to bus transportation are constructed and perceived differently in the press and on social media. Various emotions arise from posts and articles,accounting sometimes for frustrations and anger, sometimes for surprise and cheering. In this presentation, we show how the emotions evoked in Wallonia’s spatialized narratives from both media and citizens reveal a fragmentation in the representations of transport modes between public opinion and media discourse. Spatialized narratives refer to messages that mention geographic locations (a city, a municipality, etc.) and often contain emotional markers (lexical choices, polarity and emojis). We explore a corpus of 577 press narratives and 774 tweets shared in Wallonia between 2022 and 2024 using an analysis that combines a computational approach for spatial identification and thematic labeling with a manual identification of textual polarity. The results allow us to (1) produce a cartography of emotions expressed by geographic location mentioned and to show how place shapes emotion (e.g. through hashtags or metaphors), (2) compare the polarization of media narratives and those of citizens to identify the most polarized geographic areas, and (3) apply this method to a project focused on analyzing mobility needs in urban and semi-urban areas.
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Mentalechta, L., Mac Donough, M., & Cougnon, L.-A. (2025). Mapping emotions in social media and the press: A spatialised analysis of emotional references to mobility in Belgian towns. The Politics of Emotion: Affect, Identity and Power, London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, England. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/259452