Koncar Philipp, Fuchs Alexandra, Hobisch Elisabeth, Geiger Bernhard, Scholger Martina, Helic Denis
2020
Spectator periodicals contributed to spreading the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, a turning point in human history and the foundation of our modern societies. In this work, we study the spirit and atmosphere captured in the spectator periodicals about important social issues from the 18th century by analyzing text sentiment of those periodicals. Specifically, based on a manually annotated corpus of over 3 700 issues published in five different languages and over a period of more than one hundred years, we conduct a three-fold sentiment analysis: First, we analyze the development of sentiment over time as well as the influence of topics and narrative forms on sentiment. Second, we construct sentiment networks to assess the polarity of perceptions between different entities, including periodicals, places and people. Third, we construct and analyze sentiment word networks to determine topological differences between words with positive and negative polarity allowing us to make conclusions on how sentiment was expressed in spectator periodicals.Our results depict a mildly positive tone in spectator periodicals underlining the positive attitude towards important topics of the Age of Enlightenment, but also signaling stylistic devices to disguise critique in order to avoid censorship. We also observe strong regional variation in sentiment, indicating cultural and historic differences between countries. For example, while Italy perceived other European countries as positive role models, French periodicals were frequently more critical towards other European countries. Finally, our topological analysis depicts a weak overrepresentation of positive sentiment words corroborating our findings about a general mildly positive tone in spectator periodicals.We believe that our work based on the combination of the sentiment analysis of spectator periodicals and the extensive knowledge available from literary studies sheds interesting new light on these publications. Furthermore, we demonstrate the inclusion of sentiment analysis as another useful method in the digital humanist’s distant reading toolbox.
Hasani-Mavriqi Ilire, Kowald Dominik, Helic Denis, Lex Elisabeth
2018
In this paper, we study the process of opinion dynamics and consensus building inonline collaboration systems, in which users interact with each other followingtheir common interests and their social proles. Specically, we are interested inhow users similarity and their social status in the community, as well as theinterplay of those two factors inuence the process of consensus dynamics. Forour study, we simulate the diusion of opinions in collaboration systems using thewell-known Naming Game model, which we extend by incorporating aninteraction mechanism based on user similarity and user social status. Weconduct our experiments on collaborative datasets extracted from the Web. Ourndings reveal that when users are guided by their similarity to other users, theprocess of consensus building in online collaboration systems is delayed. Asuitable increase of inuence of user social status on their actions can in turnfacilitate this process. In summary, our results suggest that achieving an optimalconsensus building process in collaboration systems requires an appropriatebalance between those two factors.
Hasani-Mavriqi Ilire, Geigl Florian, Pujari Suhbash Chandra, Lex Elisabeth, Helic Denis
2016
In this paper, we study the process of opinion dynamics and consensus building in online collaboration systems, in which users interact with each other following their common interests and their social profiles. Specifically, we are interested in how users similarity and their social status in the community, as well as the interplay of those two factors influence the process of consensus dynamics. For our study, we simulate the diffusion of opinions in collaboration systems using the well-known Naming Game model, which we extend by incorporating an interaction mechanism based on user similarity and user social status. We conduct our experiments on collaborative datasets extracted from the Web. Our findings reveal that when users are guided by their similarity to other users, the process of consensus building in online collaboration systems is delayed. A suitable increase of influence of user social status on their actions can in turn facilitate this process. In summary, our results suggest that achieving an optimal consensus building process in collaboration systems requires an appropriate balance between those two factors.