Sathvik N. 2024 | BASIS Independent Silicon Valley
- Project Title: Exploring the Morality of Presidential Speech: A Moral Foundations Approach
- BASIS Independent Advisor: Hal Hansen
- Internship Location: University of California, Santa Barbara
- Onsite Mentor: Musa Malik
Through the course of this project I will be analyzing presidential debates through a Moral Foundations lens to determine if there exists significant trends between successful presidential candidates. MFT identifies five fundamental moral foundations: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. My final product will be statistically backed results that showcase a trend in one or more of the pillars of Moral Foundations. My initial hypothesis is that successful presidential candidates emphasize the foundation of care. This is based in the fact that successful candidates are better at appealing to the voter base, which can be heavily tied to the pillar of care.
My Posts
Week 6: Dictionary Applications and Initial Analysis
May 13, 2024
Welcome to my latest installment where I will go over the most recent findings that I have as well as what I plan to do going forward. This past week, I have been working on analyzing President Biden and President Trump’s debate text from 2020 and looking at some of the differences between the Presidents. […]
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Week 4: Refining My Scoring System and Unexpected Problems
March 27, 2024
Welcome to my fourth weekly update of my project. This week was mainly filled with finishing up the refinements to the code I made to the last scoring system last week as well as addressing a problem I found in my dataset this week. First in fixing the scoring system, based on previous research […]
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Week 3: Research Into the History of Political Debates
March 22, 2024
Welcome to my third weekly update of my project. This week, I spent a majority of my time researching more on presidential debates as well as returning to the scoring and dictionary systems that I will be employing throughout my project. First, looking at the influence of presidential debates, many debates, especially in the […]
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Week 2: Scraping Political Rhetoric from the Web
March 12, 2024
Welcome to my first weekly update of my project. This past week has been filled with plenty of data mining as well as initial data cleaning for the project. I have come to a general idea of what kind of data I will be using as well as where I will be pulling this data […]
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