Marius, the Giraffe: A Comparative Informatics Case Study of Linguistic Features of the Social Media Discourse

    Publikation: Bidrag til bog/antologi/rapportKonferencebidrag i proceedingsForskningpeer review

    Abstract

    On February 9, 2014, a giraffe named Marius was put to death by the Copenhagen Zoo in Denmark, sparking a storm of public discussion nationally and internationally. This paper presents a comparative informatics case study of the event. We employ the method of grounded comparison in the examination of the text of postings and articles in social media as well as mainstream media in Danish and English languages. At the macro-structural level, the social media discourse is characterized by arguments grounded in scientific and bureaucratic rationality, cultural and linguistic relativity, and animal ethics. At the micro-genetic level of language use, our findings show that international discourse was much more intense and emotional than the discourse in Danish media as evidenced by the differences in volume, sentiment and topics in English vs. Danish data. While these differences undoubtedly reflect a broad range of cultural, linguistic, organizational and societal factors, we suggest that to some extent the differences might result from specific features of the media landscape in Denmark.
    OriginalsprogEngelsk
    TitelProceeding CABS '14 Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on Collaoration Across Boundaries : Culture, Distance & Technology
    RedaktørerNaomi Yamashita, Vanessa Evers, Carolyn Rosé, Mary Beth Watson-Manheim
    UdgivelsesstedNew York
    ForlagAssociation for Computing Machinery
    Publikationsdato2014
    Sider131-140
    ISBN (Trykt)9781450325578
    DOI
    StatusUdgivet - 2014
    BegivenhedThe 5th ACM International Conference on Collaboration Across Boundaries (CABS 2014): Culture, Distance & Technology - Kyoto, Japan
    Varighed: 20 aug. 201422 aug. 2014
    Konferencens nummer: 5
    http://cabs.acm.org/2014/

    Konference

    KonferenceThe 5th ACM International Conference on Collaboration Across Boundaries (CABS 2014)
    Nummer5
    Land/OmrådeJapan
    ByKyoto
    Periode20/08/201422/08/2014
    Internetadresse

    Emneord

    • Comparative informatics
    • Grounded comparison
    • Computational linguistics
    • Social data analytics
    • Social graph
    • Social text
    • Sentiment analysis

    Citationsformater