Sentiment analysis and the literary festival audience

Literary festivals create and celebrate cultural communities that rely, in part, on emotional engagement from audiences. Emotion can be expressed in textual forms, including on social media and in surveys, and these responses illuminate the ways in which attendees attach to and participate in the festival's cultural community. This article uses sentiment analysis and close reading in a case study investigating 20,189 tweets and 921 survey responses from the 2013 Melbourne Writers Festival. I find that 38% of these responses express positive emotion while 20% express negative emotion, and that the expressed emotion tends to be moderate (somewhat positive or negative) rather than strong. This analysis is complemented by close reading of the most strongly emotive tweets and survey responses, which suggests that they relate to the audience's sense of connection with presenters. These new approaches to studying audience engagement show the significance of emotion for the contemporary literary festival and its link to perceived intimacy between writers and readers.