“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?

“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.

“The Mighty is a fairly standard San Francisco dance club, and 5:30 is generally known as happy hour the Western world over. But at the Mighty at 5:30 two Fridays ago, no DJ was on stage, and no one in the crowd yet nursed an IPA. Instead, a wiry guy wearing boxy glasses with orange curlicues for hair stood spotlighted on stage, a microphone in one hand, the other shoved in his pocket. Behind him, the words ‘Cult of the Unwilling CELEBRITY’ and an image of a chubby kid holding a stick, his eyes masked by a black rectangle, illuminated an eight-foot-tall screen. For the next 4.5 hours, the Mighty was not your typical dance club. Then again, neither was it home to your typical lecture series on Internet culture. But there it was, ROFLThing. In the words of developer and consultant Sean Savage, it was ‘one of the strangest conferences I’ve ever been to.’”

“Kevin Good became an electrician during the dot-com boom, when contractors were in short supply. ‘If you had a heartbeat, you could become an electrician,’ he quipped during a recent interview. But demand cooled over the next decade, and Good was forced to think up a different business strategy to stay afloat. He thought he found an alternative by looking skyward — solar power. Little did he know that he would encounter a series of dark clouds.”

“So you’re a fresh face in the East Bay hoping to move off of your ex-girlfriend’s cousin’s loveseat. To land the perfect temporary abode, there are a few things you have to know. Chief among them is that the Bay Area is notorious for high rental costs. But don’t resign yourself to living in a closet just yet. It remains possible, and even common, to find a decent living space in a good neighborhood for under $1,000 a month in Berkeley and Oakland.”

“Britney’s music videos are like an ever-rotating menu of fantasies, but after 10 years of Britney (‘…Baby One More Time’ was released in October 1998) our star is running out of fetishes to cop. After seeing Brit as a schoolgirl, chair dancer, flight attendant, spy, and anime character, her new video for ‘Womanizer’ features the only thing left: the Ugly One. Yes, Britney as ‘office girl’ is actually so ugly in a black bob wig, librarian glasses, and bright red lipstick that you can almost hear her saying, ‘These shoes rule.’ Dear Lord, she’s run through so many sexual types that she now must resort to making ugliness itself into a fetish. Oh, and to remind us that she’s actually the hottest minx to ever grace a TV screen, the shots of Ugly Britney cut vigorously back and forth between shots of Britney in a sauna, completely naked—and oh so shiny.”

“Almost 200 empty dollhouses are arranged to form a hilly village in a dark room. The village has no geographical coordinates, and no people live there. Its name is simply ‘Place (Village),’ and, as a work of art, it forms the cornerstone of Rachel Whiteread’s eponymous exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, on display from Oct. 15th through Jan. 25th.

The dollhouses fit together snugly, forming an eye-pleasing, three-dimensional patchwork of windows, roofs, and lights that gleam from small light bulbs and ceiling fixtures inside the homes. A few of the houses face outward, their innards exposed, holding only tiny pieces of wallpaper and the revelation that there was nothing else inside.”

“The Internet is not the real world. In a real job, a person does something useful. Giving away pictures of funny-looking cats would not count. In the real world, if someone approached a passerby on the street and offered to trade a red paperclip for his or her house, he would probably be ignored, or laughed at, or punched in the face. But, somehow, such encounters are possible on the Internet—and the Internet came alive at MIT this past Friday and Saturday at the first-ever conference for Internet phenomena: ROFLCon.”

“Last November, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) unveiled the newest addition to its collection: a marble statue of the goddess Eirene, which, at nine feet tall, towers above visitors. Created around 2000 years ago, ‘Eirene’ is an awe-inspiring piece of Greek antiquity, which constitutes a point of great pride for the museum. But she won’t be there for patrons to admire for much longer: the statue is on loan from the Italian government, and will be reclaimed in 2009.”

“When French director Michel Gondry arrived at MIT to screen his latest film, ‘Be Kind Rewind,’ the very first thing he wanted to do was meet a girl named Star Simpson. Simpson was arrested on Sept. 21, 2007 at the airport for wearing a circuit board with LED lights, which airport employees mistook for a bomb. To law enforcement, ‘she seemed out of her mind,’ Gondry said in an interview at MIT on Feb. 4, ‘and I can really relate to her craziness.’”