Twenty-Six Smells of Thanksgiving
What Twitter and Complex Network Analysis Tell Us About Our Holidays
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It is mid-November, and the smells of Thanksgiving spread all over the United States: the smell of Fall, the smell of turkey, the smell of pumpkin, and the smell of Black Friday. Wait, just four smells? Verily there must be more of them! What about the smell of unwrapped gifts? The smell of cranberries? The smell of imminent Christmas, and no less imminent, the New Year?
How many smells are there for a major American holiday? Ask twenty people — get twenty different answers. So, let’s not ask them. Let’s ask Twitter. Twitter doesn’t lie.
Our raw dataset consists of 71,637 tweets that contain one or several hashtags #thanksgiving, #thanksgiving2020 (why not?), #thanskgiving2021, #thanksgiving21, #thanksgivingturkey, #thanksgivingturkey2021, #thanksgivingwhileblack, #turkeyday2021, and #turkeyday. There is more than one way to skin a cat, and we should not overlook any of them.
