📊 Queer Slur Analysis on Reddit

📄 Project Overview

This project investigates the usage and context of queer slurs across three different subreddits. Using web scraping (Reddit API & PRAW), NLP techniques, and collocational analysis, this study explores how slurs are used in different online spaces, focusing on performativity, reclamation, and linguistic shifts.

🔍 Research Focus

• Which queer slurs appear most frequently in these communities?
• Are these terms used as reclaimed language or in a derogatory manner?
• How do collocates (words surrounding these slurs) impact meaning?

📂 Data Collection

• Source: Data scraped from Reddit (3 subreddits).
• Tools Used:
  • PRAW for Reddit API access
  • BeautifulSoup for HTML parsing
  • NLTK / spaCy for NLP processing
• Corpus: Collected comments containing the terms: queer, faggot, dyke, homo.

🛠 Methods & Analysis

• Collocational analysis (Word Window ±3) to examine linguistic patterns.
• Sentiment analysis to assess how slurs are used in context.
• Frequency distributions of slurs and common collocates.

📊 Results

• Initial findings suggest that queer slurs used in designated queer spaces such as r/Queer or r/LGBT are used in a more positive or neutral way. In spaces such as r/conservative, queer slurs are used in more inflammatory and hateful contexts.
• Detailed analysis and visualization to be added.
• This project was for a corpus linguistics class for my master's program

📊 Sentiment Distribution by Subreddit

This visualization shows the sentiment distribution (Negative, Neutral, Positive) of queer slur mentions across three different subreddits.

🚀 How to Run This Project

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/malorieiovino/reddit-slur-analysis.git
   

📓 Jupyter Notebook

You can view the full Jupyter Notebook here:
🚀 View Notebook on nbviewer
📂 View Notebook on GitHub

⚠ Disclaimer: This project is for personal research purposes only. No contributions or modifications are permitted.