Understanding the Themes of Disability Discourse Through Reddit Comments

With the advent of internet forums, sharing opinions in a public sphere has never been easier, especially for those facing marginalization in their communities. Forums offer a neutral, semi-anonymous space wherein people may feel more compelled to share intimate details about the characteristics of their lives. This paper focuses on internet forums related to disabilities, specifically those found on Reddit, and uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to extract topics from the corpus of 3 subreddits: r/Blind, r/ADHD, and r/Disability. The features are then put into key term groups that are defined by a key phrase. This created category taxonomy is then used to qualitatively analyze the topics of discussion themselves through the posts and how these topics change over time.