In collaboration with the Atlanta Community Food Bank, our team is dedicated to breaking the glass ceiling on SNAP coverage, conversation and education across the nation. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, is a federal nutrition program that provides food-purchasing assistance to millions of eligible low-income individuals and families. The Atlanta Community Food Bank serves more than 600 nonprofits partner agencies in 29 Georgia counties. In conjunction with county food banks across Georgia the Feeding America network tackles critical societal issues hindering communities such as food insecurity, food deserts, and economic stability.
Over the course of the first week our team had the opportunity to gather background research regarding the SNAP program, questions and met with the Atlanta Community Food Bank to gain meaningful insight. After obtaining the necessary primary pulmonary research, our team organized the news articles provided and scraped their text and content to assess key factors such as, the location of the article, author, overall viewpoint on SNAP, and publication.
To incorporate a diverse array of content, comments from Facebook api and Twitter data was also scraped and analyzed for sentiment analysis. To properly convey the discourse regarding SNAP to the community at large and Atlanta Food Bank leadership, we decided it would be easiest to create mediums where the content could most effectively be illustrated. Visualization tool such as a shiny application in R are currently underway to help tie in the various mediums, as well as word clouds of frequently used words/ phrases, and possibly a “SNAP App.”
Based on the data sets our team builds we can identify critical components such as the main “arguments” and national sentiment about SNAP, whether conservative or liberal news outlets use the term more frequently, and track the combined traffic with author evaluations and viewpoints.
We look forward to a challenging and rewarding experience working on this project!