Ranking of the National Parks

Twitter Comments

Twitter is a popular social media across the nation, and we can get use of the twitter contents to analyze people’s feeling on national parks with the method of sentiment analysis. In this part, we gather twitter comments on every national parks via Twitter API. Then we apply sentiment analysis on the twitters and get the average polarity.

Visitor Data

The best way to get an idea of the popularity of one park is to take a look at its visitor numbers. Here we get the historical visitor data from 2007 to 2016.

The map below shows the location of each national park, as well as its polarity and visitor numbers. The larger the circle of the park is, the more visitors it attracts.

Ranking of the National Parks

Before combining the two factors above, we apply normalization for the visitor data and give both of the factors weight of 0.5. That is, we create a ranking metric composed of half visitor data and half polarity of twitter sentiment analysis. The ranking of the parks are shown in the barplot below.