"Is Long-distance Hiking an Emotional Roller Coaster?" Evaluating Emotions and Weather Effects on the Appalachian Trail
Morva Saaty, Natalie Andrus, Norhan Abdelgawad, Jennifer Chandran, Brett Noneman, Justice Jackson, Kun Alading, Taha Hassan, D Scott Mccrickard, Shalini Misra, Kris Wernstedt
Project Description
Conference Paper published in ACM CHI (2024), funded by the National Science Foundation
This study analyzed over 150,000 Appalachian Trail blogs to explore the emotional journey of long-distance hikers. Using emotion recognition and weather data, we found that joy and fear were the most common emotions, with factors like rain, temperature, and humidity significantly shaping hikers’ experiences. The findings highlight how weather and trail conditions create an ‘emotional roller coaster,’ offering insights for outdoor computing and community support design.
My Role
As a research assistant for this project, I
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contributed to the data collection and preprocessing process
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created algorithms to scrape public hiker blogs, finding key words and phrases, and correlating them to specific locations on the Appalachian Trail
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created visualizations based on findings
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analyzed hiker's narratives by using emotion recognition (DistilRoBERTa) and topic modeling (BERTopic)
Tools Used: Pandas (Python Library), OpenWeather API, ArcGIS, Fuzzywuzzy (Python library), Python preprocessing scripts, Beautiful Soup (bs4), Observable.js