Last week – April 25 – Facebook posted the 2018 first-quarter data on revenues and users (here the original post from Facebook.) The perhaps unexpected take-home message is that, in spite of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, everything seems to go well with the social media. In particular, monthly users continued to grow at the expected rate (see the graph below – original here).
Houellebecq and the Internet
If you read this blog, or if you follow my activity on Twitter, you may know that I have a fairly relaxed attitude towards the “dangers” of the digital world. The great majority of supposed perils correspond more or less to what happens in our offline lives, and – in our offline lives too – we tend to be vulnerable to external influences only up to a certain point (here an excellent paper argumenting that we are not as gullible as we think – in fact, as we think others are). I wrote about the digital spread of fake news mirroring the traditional spread of rumours (according to BuzzFeed, the fake news that generated more engagement on Facebook in 2017 is titled “Babysitter transported to hospital after inserting a baby in her vagina”), about the inconsistencies of the “post-truth” narrative, or about the exaggeration of the digital echo-chambers danger (I would probably write differently today these two, rather old, posts).
Lies and truth in social media
Few thoughts on an important paper that just appeared in Science, The spread of true and false news online. The paper received (and will receive) justified attention: it is massive (“~126,000 rumor cascades spread by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times” in a long temporal window – from 2006 to 2017), it includes several detailed analyses (the authors did not only check basic metrics such as speed and size of diffusion, but they measured things like structural virality; the proportion of political versus non-political news; the role of bots; they run a sentiment analysis of the tweets, etc.), and it has a straightforward (and I guess welcome to many) take-home message: “fake” news are more successfull than “true” news in social media, at least in Twitter (*).
The death of content in academic job adverts
As my current (and last) postdoc contract is going to finish, I am actively looking for a job. Yesterday, while in line to board a plane, I saw a tweet signalling three positions in digital humanities at London’s King’s College. While I do not exactly fit with the area (not that there are many areas I fit exactly with), a good amount of my research is of interest to digital humanities (for example, here or here), and I had few positive interactions with other practitioners. So, I clicked on one of the links proposed (you can try this, it is the same for all).
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Workshop on text mining emotions in pop song lyrics
I will hold a one-day practical workshop on “Emotions in 50 Years of Pop Song Lyrics: A Text Mining Approach” at the 7th Winter School Fact and Method: Data, Borders and Interpretation in Tartu – Estonia, the 7th of February 2018 (this blog post can give an idea of what we will do). The participation for PhD students is free of charge and, according to the organisers, in some cases, it is possible to reimburse the accommodation. See below a short description of the workshop and some suggested readings.
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