Measuring and profiling the topical influence and sentiment contagion of public event stakeholders

•Four indicators about topical and sentiment propagation are proposed.•The diversity of microblogging emotions varies inversely with the number of microblog entries across different stages.•About 61.4 % of the retweets that disseminated the same topic(s) as the original posts brought the same emotion(s).•The stakeholder types with high topical influence usually have low sentiment influence and vice versa.•The stakeholder types with high topical/sentiment influence spread information to those with low influence. When public events occur, users often generate a huge number of microblog entries and their online interactions with one another. Forwarding and commenting on posts contribute to the huge networks of topic and sentiment communication. This study constructs the topic and sentiment propagation maps of microblogging in the context of public events to visually explore the patterns of topic and sentiment propagation among stakeholders across different phases. To quantify the influence of topic and sentiment propagation, four indicators of “topic out-degree,” “topic variation degree,” “sentiment out-degree,” and “sentiment deviation degree” are proposed. We chose the child abuse case in the Beijing Red-Yellow-Blue (RYB) Kindergarten for our study. The positions of various stakeholders in the propagation paths and the relationship among stakeholders were revealed. Results indicate that the government and mainstream media have the greatest influence in terms of topic and sentiment propagation. Moreover, topic propagation was the most influential in the recession phase and the same can be said with sentiment propagation in the spreading phase. The findings can help the emergency management departments gain a better understanding of the propagation patterns of topics and emotions and the role of stakeholders in such phenomena to improve their emergency response ability.