Faculty Sponsor: Maryam Gooyabadi and Emy Matesan
Vlad Grass
Vlad Grass is a rising Second Year at Wesleyan University, planning on majoring in Economics and minoring in Data Analysis. Vlad is a member of the Men’s Crew team. Vlad lives in Vermont and attended The Hotchkiss School for highschool.
Abstract:
This project investigates how the Muslim Brotherhood adapted its communication across three key political periods: before the 2013 coup, after the coup, and following the 2021 factional split. A corpus of 1,585 statements was collected through web scraping from Brotherhood-affiliated sources and analyzed using a combination of natural language processing tools and statistical modeling of key features. AI-enhanced feature extraction was employed to identify rhetorical targets, framing, sentiment, and political content. Key-word extraction was used to quantify shifts in preferred terminology. AFINN-based sentiment analysis captured tonal shifts, while LDA topic modeling as well as hand-coded topic extraction highlighted changes in thematic structure of posts based on period and faction. The target audience of statements was also classified and compared across period and faction. A fixed-effects panel regression on monthly post counts showed significant increases in messaging volume surrounding both the 2013 coup and 2021 split. These results highlight the methodological utility of combining automated and manual text classification and feature extraction with temporal modeling to study organizational communication under political stress.
Copy-of-QAC201-Poster-Final-Vlad-Grass-5