Detecting Sadness in 140 Characters

“Has Twitter Handicapped Our Ability to Mourn?” asks Danny Macsai of Fast Company.

Web Ecology Project’s latest release and my project along with Sam Gilbert, “Detecting Sadness in 140 Characters,” is both the fruit of our hard labor and what Sasha Frere-Jones has lovingly called an ‘academic study that reads like a paraody’. We published on August 18th.

From our abstract:

“Michael Jackson’s death created an emotional outpouring of unprecedented magnitude on Twitter. In this report, we examine 1,860,427 tweets about Jackson’s death in order to test various methods of sentiment analysis and gain insights into how people express emotion on Twitter.”

[Some] Key findings

• At its peak, the conversation about Michael Jackson’s death on Twitter proceeded at a rate of 78 tweets per second.
• Roughly 3/4 of tweets about Jackson’s death that use the word “sad” actually express sadness, suggesting that sentiment analysis based on word usage is fairly accurate.
• Tweets expressing personal, emotional sadness about the Jackson’s death showed strong agreement among coders while commentary on the auxiliary social effects of Jackson’s death showed strong disagreement.
• We argue that this pattern in the “understandability” of certain types of communication across Twitter is due to the way the platform structures the expression of its users.

From Macsci of Fast Company:

“Given the mourning precedents set by Facebook and MySpace, you’d think many—if not most—Twitter users would eulogize the King of Pop, or simply convey sadness. Not quite. According to Elsa Kim and Sam Gilbert, who spent weeks analyzing roughly 1.9 million Jackson tweets (and published their findings today):

As a loosely organized messaging network, Twitter does not operate as a “memorial” akin to clearly delimited online spaces like MySpace and Facebook. Given the short-lived nature of data on Twitter (the tweets [we analyzed] are no longer available in Twitter’s search, which only goes back roughly a week), users appear more inclined to report Jackson’s death as a current event and less inclined to memorialize or collectively grieve. Furthermore, Twitter appears to be a far more “personal” medium than other online spaces: tweeters tended to comment on sadness as individuals watching the public reaction instead of commiserating with particular friends or communities.

In other words: Twitter has handicapped our ability to mourn.”

Have you read the report — or even just what I posted here? I’d love to hear any and all comments or criticism: please poke holes in our work. What are your thoughts?