New on the arXiv: “Ousiometrics and Telegnomics: The essence of meaning conforms to a two-dimensional powerful-weak and dangerous-safe framework with diverse corpora presenting a safety bias” https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06847 We measure essential meaning using language as the map. Some definitions: 1. Ousiometrics: The quantitative study of the essential meaningful components of an entity, however perceived. 2. Telegnomics: The far sensing of knowledge (~ distant reading) ...

"Sentiment and structure in word co-occurrence networks on Twitter" New preprint from our group led by @uvmcomplexity postdoc @MikaelaFudolig Using tweets containing #imwithher or #crookedhillary, both relating to Hillary Clinton's presidential bid in 2016, we explore the relationship between context and sentiment through word co-occurrence networks. ...

“Augmenting semantic lexicons using word embeddings and transfer learning” New preprint from our group led by Thayer Alshaabi https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.09010 In prior work, we surveyed internet people for their emotional response to words. Surprising no one, we found "hahaha" consistently reflects the good vibes. ...

We have a new paper, interactive visualization, and data platform. Nutshell: we’ve curated 100 billion tweets over 10 years to produce day-scale rank/frequency time series for n-grams in over 100 languages. It’s a whole big thing. A short thread—The paper: “Storywrangler: A massive exploratorium for sociolinguistic, cultural, socioeconomic, and political timelines using Twitter” ...

"Blending search queries with social media data to improve forecasts of economic indicators" New preprint led by Yi Li & Adam Fox from @mmdatascience w/help from our group https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06096 This work extends a model recently proposed by Dingdong Yi, @ShaoyangNing, Chia-Jung Chang, & S. C. Kou in their paper "Forecasting Unemployment Using Internet Search Data via PRISM" ...

“Say Their Names: Resurgence in the collective attention toward Black victims of fatal police violence following the death of George Floyd” New study from our group in collaboration w/ @reharp @foucaultwelles @ryanjgallager. https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.10281 The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 sparked international protests, renewed attention to #blacklivesmatter, and set several records for online activity. ...

“Quantifying language changes surrounding mental health on Twitter” New preprint led by @uvmcomplexity MS student @am_stupinski https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01481 Using a random 10% of all tweets posted since 2012, we find that mentions of ‘mental health’ have increased by two orders of magnitude. ...

New paper on the arXiv from @compstorylab: “The incel lexicon: Deciphering the emergent cryptolect of a global misogynistic community” K. Gothard et team. https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.12006 Adapted from the paper: The concept of 'incels' has come to refer to an online community of men who bear antipathy towards themselves, women, and society-at-large for their perceived inability to find and maintain sexual relationships. ...

"The growing amplification of social media: measuring temporal and social contagion dynamics for over 150 languages on Twitter for 2009–2020" on a new publication from our group in @epj_ds We've gone back through over 100 billion messages in our Twitter data set* and re-identified the language of each tweet. *We have 10% from the end of 2008 on, an absolute treasure trove of tweets ...