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

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.