Keywords: Olympic Legacy; Sentiment Analysis; Discourse Analysis.
The Olympic Games happen every four years in a different city around the world for three weeks. These three weeks however are planned for a long time before the event in order to provide not only the spectators but also the citizens with the best experience as possible. However, what is left behind after the games, its legacy, has been often criticized.
This paper aims to analyse the narratives about the legacy of both Rio 2016 and London 2012 Olympics over a period of 6 years (3 years before and 3 years after each event). We are going to conduct temporal sentiment analysis on a bilingual data-set (English and Portuguese) based on news articles published by the biggest media companies in Brazil and UK: Globo and BBC. Besides their size and importance to the public opinion, both media companies hold the rights to broadcast officially the games in their countries. Moreover, we will include the three most read newspapers of each country. Texts will be extracted from the websites and analysed first in a distant reading using the method of sentiment analysis and, subsequently in a close reading.
The objective of this analysis is to use the measures provided by the sentiment analysis to compare the range of positivity and negativity in the coverage of such different event realities, considering that the Rio Olympics was the first Olympic Games hosted by a country in the South world. The results will be used to define the concept of Legacy by analysing which kind of outcomes are mentioned on the news. The study will then be conducted by using the Discourse Analysis framework, looking at the impact of the usage of some words, mainly adjectives, in building a narrative of a disastrous or satisfactory and successful event.
For automated analysis, best suited text analytics and multimodal machine learning techniques will be studied and applied to obtain meaningful results and test the hypothesis.