Still alive and actually resting during the winter break for the first time since I started grad school. Got a new entry up at The Wordpress. This time I'm trying something a little different and instead of doing an essay on technology and culture, I've typed up a quick explanation of four sentiment analysis tools that do not require a download and are COMPLETELY ACCESSIBLE TO TOTAL BEGINNERS WITH NO TECH OR SOFTWARE BACKGROUND!

A Dabbler’s Guide to Sentiment Analysis 101

This week I am trying something a little different. In lieu of a post on theoretical or cultural questions poised by some technological innovation or another, I wrote up a short introduction to open source sentiment analysis software, a post meant for complete beginners. I am currently experimenting with a biweekly (twice a week) posting schedule alternating long and short posts. We’ll see if this is the most efficient set up!

While I am aware of the many, many, MANY different tools out there (see Oxford LibGuides Text Analysis Tools), I limit myself to these four for the sake of brevity. The four are: Hedonometer, Story Lab, Socialmention, and Tweet Sentiment Visualization. Though elementary, these platforms are good starting points for those who have never done any sentiment analysis or basic data mining before, as they require no computer skills except the ability to type and do not required download. I hope to provide a more sophisticated tutorial at some point in the future. I do not have time to go over what sentiment analysis “is,” so I suggest familiarizing yourself with the concept if necessary.

Read more...

 
Excerpt:
Your Echo Chamber is Destroying Democracy.” “The Filter Bubble Explains Why Trump Won and You Didn’t See It Coming (The Cut).” “Journalists and Trump Voters Live in Parallel Universes.” These are just three choice examples of news publications that have factored filter bubbles as an agent in the destruction of democracy in the age of Trump and why Trump’s election caught many off guard. Filter bubbles, so the common wisdom goes, contribute to the kind of social homophily that stalls democratic debate, eases the rise of fascism, and leads readers to trust media sources based on partisan or ideological identification rather than epistemological rigor...For these reasons, there is a potential to create algorithmic “parallel universes” in which audiences cannot agree on the shared facts necessarily to have productive political dialogue. Therefore, drawing from influential political theorist John Dewey, Pariser declares that “filter bubble” is danger to democracy.

 


Cross-posted from Wordpress.

"This is not a post about why the announcement that Tumblr would be purged of adult content on December 17, 2018 is dumb and harmful. We all know that it is stupid. We all know a Puritanical purge does nothing to protect child trafficking victims and it is using the cultural fixation on “the innocence of the child” (not too get too Lee Edelman here) as its rationale, presumably under the assumption that this rational is so culturally sacred that no one would dare reject it despite, again, it not helping children in any way... No, this is about algorithmic sorting as a moralizing framework. How they make meaning out of the social reality they are created to compute based on the values encoded into them and in doing so "encode" these values in the performative infrastructure that makes up our world."

Read more....