Trevor Stokes, “Twitter Gauges Global Mood Swings, Researchers Find” (International Business Times, Sep. 29, 2011)
Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com and the former On Language columnist for The New York Times, called the study “an interesting one, and part of a new wave of work that takes a data-driven approach to analyzing affect and emotional expression,” in an email to IB Times. “Linguists themselves may be a bit wary of this brute-force word-counting approach, but the results can be striking, with robust correlations.
“Personally, I’m excited by all the new research possibilities that are made possible by the Twitter corpus and other collections of online texts. Granted, the results of this particular study might not seem so earth-shattering — the conclusions that ‘people get crankier as the day goes on’ and ‘people are happier on weekends’ would strike many as self-evident,” Zimmer wrote. “But I think we’re on the cusp of a new era of looking at language and communication…. We’re learning more and more about the linguistic signatures that we leave behind, and what these traces say about our own personalities and the ways we interact.”
Read the rest here.