Hoop Hype: Measuring Media Sentiment to Quantify NBA Team Perception

Barker, Luke

Hoop Hype: Measuring Media Sentiment to Quantify NBA Team Perception

Persistent URL

https://hdl.handle.net/10456/59195

Author(s)

Barker, Luke

Date Issued

April 25, 2025

Abstract

The motivation behind my project is the way that the current NBA media space is right now. This project aims to expose media bias in NBA Media. Studies have been done performing sentiment analysis using combining different variations of methods, but none using SpaCyTextblob in articles about NBA media. Also, this project is the first of its kind to look at media bias specifically in the NBA and display the results on a deployed dashboard. The data for this project was accumulated over multiple months during the 2024-2025 NBA season using articles from NewsAPI with the query search being set to "NBA". Once the articles were collected, I used a tool called SpaCyTextblob by SpaCy to perform the sentiment analysis. The dashboard displaying the final results was made using a tool called 11ty which can create a simple HTML dashboard for a static site. I tested other sentiment analysis tools to make sure that I chose the correct one for sports related media articles. The second experiment that I ran was testing different sized data files and seeing which file size of data would produce the best results. This project is a building block for exposing media bias in the NBA. One direction that this project could be furthered in would be analyzing the sentiment results and comparing it to real life trends in the NBA and cross reference those trends with my results to see if there is any correlation. Overall this project is a large step towards exposing media bias NBA and is the foundation for future work in this specific area.

Major

Computer Science

First Reader(s)

Jumadinova, Janyl A.