What do your emojis say about you

One of our two final posts in our 12 days of HPC series looking at using the HPC to study emojis and emotions!

During the month of December we’re featuring blog posts from researchers from across the University of Leeds showcasing the fantastic work they do using our High Performance Computing system. Follow us @RC_at_Leeds to keep up to date with our 12 days of HPC blog series.

What’s your name?

Daniel Valdenegro

What department do you work in?

Social Science

What research question are you trying to answer?

I’m using emojis as proxys for emotional reaction in short text in social media, to then apply this social movements twitter or reddit trends.

How does HPC help your research?

I do a lot unicode text processing over hundreds of gigabytes of data. The high memory nodes allow me to fit the small chinks of date in memory for fast processing. The normal nodes allow me to have very long running processes munching my bigger chunks of data for me.

What is the potential impact of your research?

Better understanding of how social movements use emotions and social media to gather participant and produce real life mobilizations.

In your personal opinion what’s the coolest thing about your research?

The emojis 😉

What’s your favourite christmas film?

Die Hard