elsagold: the WUMBL.OG

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?

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August 11

I edited together this rap video for our Digitas client, Intercontinental Hotel Group. They’ve got a promotion goin’ on (stay 2 nights at one of their properties, get another night free at any property), so this hopefully gets the point across…

Most of my effort went into make the video short, snappy, and engaging. Not to mention trying to create a story from the footage. Let me know with this little answer box - what do you think?

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Reimagining Internet Studies: A Web Ecology Perspective

“Web Ecology studies the relationship of the nature of data and the behavior of actors on the internet.

Our field poses two simple questions to researchers:

‘Where have studies about the web failed?’ and,
‘How can we do better?’ “

This manifesto declares the principles of our new academic approach to studying the web, and it makes me horny. It’s up on my wall, like a poster of Hendrix.

To me, the sexiest of the nine principles listed are “comprehensiveness” and “experimental.” The former is intrinsically counter to the modern mode of academia, which seeks to specialize scholars until their particular research no longer has relevance to a layperson. Yet, at the core of everything I do is an undying craving to understand how the world and its people work and move. Academia promises to teach, but instead it narrows one’s vision so that greater learning and questioning is inhibited.

The latter just acknowledges what everyone enacts: that life resembles a game. We are as competitive in our lives as we are at sports or Magic the Gathering (yes, I just bust that out with a straight face. EAT IT). Experimental, to me, means excitement and openness of possibility. Inherent in every question, every “what if…?”, is an unwillingness to settle for mundane or expected. Kicking up dirt, seeing what you can find or create - that’s the true stuff of life.

If you are wondering why this is tagged as part of my portfolio, it is because I am a part of this nascent movement, and contributed to the drafting of this statement.

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August 5

Published August 4th on Bostonist: my audio slideshow about the opening of local sculptor Jesse Kaminsky’s latest work, Bubbleraft 2, being shown at Meme Gallery in Cambridge through August 9th.

I crave feedback like it’s sustenance, so please let me know what you think. What was compelling? What didn’t make sense? What bored you? Why would you click on an audio slideshow in the first place? What would make you watch an audio slideshow again?

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August 3

I posted the link when it went live on July 24th, but for archival purposes, here is the first audio slideshow I made, for Bostonist, on local band You Can Be A Wesley.

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April 1

Welcome to my Portfolio - ish.

I’ve been thinking lately about how to create a portfolio site that can showcase my work. I have a neat concept in mind that will take a little development, but in the meantime, I thought it would be fun and simple to set up a “portfolio” on my Tumblog, simply by tagging the posts I’ve written about my work. Here, you can see some of the things I’ve done, ideas I have, or the projects I’m working on.

A SIMPLE KEY:

The text posts and red text links demonstrate my WRITING—mostly arts and culture criticism for The Harvard Crimson or the East Bay Express. You can also check out my writer’s profile on the Crimson web site or a search of my name on the East Bay Express web site.

Video posts show my DANCING and CHOREOGRAPHY or my VIDEO EDITING work. I specialize in documentary and music video. In each genre, timing is absolutely key to creating excitement and a narrative. These skills and concepts have a strong analog in writing good prose.

Ideas make me tick, and I sometimes think of my life in terms of its projects. These loosely group into “IRL” (In Real Life) events and Internet research projects I am working on.

I frequently plan events to bring people together around the arts, food, and/or education. These are tagged to demonstrate my EVENT-PLANNING abilities.

Meanwhile, the Internet projects revolve around developing my understanding of the Internet as a platform for meaningful social connection and enhancing the awareness of creativity in our lives. When demanded to use buzzwords to describe my interests, “social media” and “interactive advertising” are some of them. These projects spring from my fascination with the INTERNET and both NEW and SOCIAL MEDIA. I’m convinced that the Internet expands, not contracts, the possibilities for journalism - it’s just time to rethink its form and transmission.

Finally, there is also one example of my PHOTOGRAPHY. I think it’s lovely. So, onto my show-off page it goes!

Enjoy!

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Candy-Coated Art Delights And Provokes
Gonzalez-Torres’s sea of candy a treat for both eye and mind

Published in The Harvard Crimson on Thursday, November 15, 2007

(*Note: I’m posting this for the purposes of my portfolio experiment, so this is not a timely article. I repeat… this is not a timely article, and if you would like to go see this artist’s work, you will not be able to go to the Carpenter Center to find it. That is all.)

It’s typically a bleak emotional Siberia inside the Carpenter Center. I’ve never had a reason to expect anything besides the cold concrete walls of the main gallery here. And yet, defying their stark surroundings, hundreds of golden candies gleam upon the grey floor in front of me. Félix González-Torres’s “Untitled” (Placebo – Landscape – For Roni) is a brilliant surprise, finding appropriate context in Le Corbusier’s stark modernist complex.

The exhibition, curated by Helen Molesworth, Harvard University Art Museum’s new curator of contemporary art, runs until January 4, 2008.

“Untitled” is one of Felix González-Torres’s beloved “candy pours.” The toffees composing the piece shine like an expansive sea, shaped into a rectangle bounded by nothing but the grey floor. The weight of the candy is predetermined, but the curator is allowed to determine the dimensions of the pour.

I’m tempted to throw myself into it like a newly coronated prince into his gold coins, or at least to grab a greedy handful like Augustus Gloop in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” But instead I stand tentatively on the brink, unsure of what is allowed here. We typically see art as untouchable, and are required to keep a physical distance, if not an emotional one.

I shrink back as a professor walks by. “Take one!” he says, “they’ll be replaced.” Elated and relieved, I crouch down and pick up a piece, then unwrap the toffee and ingest the art. All the while, I feel small waves of my sacrilegious act crush down into my stomach.

Both rich and minimalist, “Untitled” embodies the themes of identity and mortality that run throughout his work. González-Torres, a Cuban-born American, remains known for his installations of everyday objects, like strings of lightbulbs and sheets of paper, displayed in multiples of their simple material beauty.

After 1988, González-Torres named all of his works “Untitled,” and frequently gave a second name in parentheses. “Untitled” (Placebo – Landscape – For Roni) has two parenthetical names, which both suggest the psychological dialogue between the viewer and the piece.

Placebos, typically sugar pills parading as medicine, only affect the body through the patient’s belief that the pill is an actual cure. A victim of AIDS, González-Torres was constantly facing thoughts of his own mortality. His work is both sensual and hopeful. The toffees have a placebo effect, changing the material candy into a more intangible and lasting connection between the viewer and González-Torres.

The second name in parentheses, “Landscape,” conjures an understanding of a landscape as endless and distant. Yet the mini-landscape is clearly a bounded quantity of candies, one that I was apprehensive to deplete. Viewers only feel comfortable taking pieces from the exhibition when they have faith that the candy will be replaced.

When the candy is eaten, a triangular relationship of dependency forms between the curator replenishing the toffee, the viewer consuming the work, and González-Torres’s overarching conception of the piece. Each element depends on the others for its own existence, and the candies form the material link between all three.

González-Torres presents these simple objects not to imbue them with significance so much as to expose the meaning already existing in their materiality. Their golden color, homogeneity, and edibility form an enchanting physical and mental link between creators and viewers that revels in being brilliant and hopeful—almost absurdly so.

Despite the mind tricks and the melancholy of depletion, the whole experience of “Untitled” (Placebo – Landscape – For Roni) is like being a kid; it captures just the perfect amount of wonderment. And although it lies on the floor, “lies” is far too passive a word. The work calls us to eat it, and in doing so, crosses the normal boundaries placed between art and public.

My dancing & choreography

The Expressions show, Spring 2007

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My video-editing.

Liz Michaud’s dance at the Expressions Show, Fall 2008

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