Strategies for the analysis of large social media corpora: sampling and keyword extraction methods

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media platforms such as Twitter have been of great importance for users to exchange news, ideas, and perceptions. Researchers from fields such as discourse analysis and the social sciences have resorted to this content to explore public opinion and stance on this topic, and they have tried to gather information through the compilation of large-scale corpora. However, the size of such corpora is both an advantage and a drawback, as simple text retrieval techniques and tools may prove to be impractical or altogether incapable of handling such masses of data. This study provides methodological and practical cues on how to manage the contents of a large-scale social media corpus such as Chen et al. (JMIR Public Health Surveill 6(2):e19273, 2020) COVID-19 corpus. We compare and evaluate, in terms of efficiency and efficacy, available methods to handle such a large corpus. First, we compare different sample sizes to assess whether it is possible to achieve similar results despite the size difference and evaluate sampling methods following a specific data management approach to storing the original corpus. Second, we examine two keyword extraction methodologies commonly used to obtain a compact representation of the main subject and topics of a text: the traditional method used in corpus linguistics, which compares word frequencies using a reference corpus, and graph-based techniques as developed in Natural Language Processing tasks. The methods and strategies discussed in this study enable valuable quantitative and qualitative analyses of an otherwise intractable mass of social media data.Funding for open access publishing: Universidad de Málaga/CBUA. This work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [Grant No. PID2020-115310RB-I00], the Regional Govvernment of Andalusia [Grant No. UMA18-FEDERJA-158] and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Vocational Training [Grant No. FPU 19/04880]. Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málaga / CBU

Corpus annotation and analysis of sarcasm on Twitter: #CatsMovie vs. #TheRiseOfSkywalker

Sentiment analysis is a natural language processing task that has received increased attention in the last decade due to the vast amount of opinionated data on social media platforms such as Twitter. Although the methodologies employed have grown in number and sophistication, analysing irony and sarcasm still poses a severe problem. From the linguistic perspective, sarcasm has been studied in discourse analysis from several perspectives, but little attention has been given to specific metrics that measure its relevance. In this paper we describe the creation of a manually-annotated dataset where detailed text markers are included. This dataset is a sample from a larger corpus of tweets (n= 76,764) on two highly controversial films: Cats and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. We took two different samples for each film, one before and one after their release, to compare reception and presence of sarcasm. We then used a sentiment analysis tool to measure the impact of sarcasm in polarity detection and then manually classified the mechanisms of sarcasm generation. The resulting corpus will be useful for machine learning approaches to sarcasm detection as well as discourse analysis studies on irony and sarcasm

The Effects of Social Identity and Emotional Connection on SubjectiveWell-Being in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic for a Spanish Sample.

This study analyzes whether the degree of social identity and the degree of emotional connection influence the subjective well-being of individuals that participated in collective acts of support for health personnel fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic. Our sample was composed of 810 participants who resided in Spain (339 women and 471 men) with an average age of 34.22 (SD = 12.56). All of them frequently participated in the acts of support that took place each day of the lockdown decreed by the National Government on 14 March 2020. The results show that the greater identification with the group (the country) and the greater the emotional connection, the higher the scores obtained in subjective well-being. The results also show that emotional connection had a positive effect on emotional subjective well-being, mediated by the social identity activated in the collective act. The results are interpreted from the perspective of social identity that highlights the role played by social identity in influencing health and subjective well-being

Fenton chemistry-based detemplation of an industrially relevant microcrystalline beta zeolite. Optimization and scaling-up studies

A mild template removal of microcrystalline beta zeolite, based on Fenton chemistry, was optimized. Fenton detemplation was studied in terms of applicability conditions window, reaction rate and scale up. TGA and CHN elemental analysis were used to evaluate the detemplation effectiveness, while ICP, XRD, LPHR-Ar physisorption, and 27Al MAS NMR were applied to characterize the structure and texture of the resulting materials. The material properties were compared to calcination. By understanding the interplay of relevant parameters of the Fenton chemistry, the process can be optimized in order to make it industrially attractive for scale-up. The H2O2 utilization can be minimized down to 15 mL H2O2/g (88 °C, 30 ppm Fe), implying a high solid concentration and low consumption of H2O2. When Fe concentration must be minimized, values as low as 5 ppm Fe can be applied (88 °C, 30 mL H2O2/g), to achieve full detemplation. The reaction time to completeness can be reduced to 5 h when combining a Fe-oxalate catalyst with UV radiation. The protocol was scaled up to 100 times larger its original recipe. In terms of the material's properties, the scaled material is structurally comparable to the calcined counterpart (comparable Si/Al and XRD patterns), while it displays benefits in terms of texture and Al-coordination, the latter with full preservation of the tetrahedral A

The use of Tik Tok in higher education as a motivating source for students

This article presents a study conducted at the University of Málaga with the participation of second-year students from the Degree in English Studies. It focuses on a Tik Tok project that the participants had to edit for the British History class in the academic year 2020/2021. The students’ reception of said project as an innovative learning tool, both as applied to English as a second language and to the content of the courses, was analysed and measured using a questionnaire that was elaborated ad hoc and properly validated. Our results indicate great success and acceptance of the activity on the part of the students, who consider that this innovative approach to learning being highly integrated with new technologies fosters the comprehension and active learning of the subject, thus enhancing comprehension in a stimulating and motivating way. Key words: Tik Tok, learning tool, innovative approach, new technologies, motivation.Este artículo describe un estudio llevado a cabo en la Universidad de Málaga en el Grado de Estudios Ingleses con alumnos del segundo curso en la asignatura Historia y Civilización de las Islas Británicas. En él se presenta un proyecto basado en Tik Tok que los alumnos tuvieron que realizar en la clase de Historia Británica durante el curso académico 2020/2021. Tras describir el proyecto mencionado anteriormente, se analizó y midió mediante un cuestionario, elaborado para este propósito y debidamente validado, la recepción que los estudiantes tuvieron de dicho proyecto como una herramienta integradora del proceso digital y a su vez motivadora, tanto dentro del contexto de la lengua inglesa como con el contenido de la asignatura de historia, dentro del ámbito de un aprendizaje integrado en contenidos y lengua. Los resultados obtenidos son muy positivos y muestran una gran aceptación por parte del alumnado, que considera que el aprendizaje compuesto por un alto componente digital motiva e implica a los alumnos de manera fructífera y efectiva, fomentando así el aprendizaje de una manera más significativa. Palabras clave: Tik Tok, herramienta de aprendizaje, enfoque innovador, nuevas tecnologías, motivación

The language of happiness in self-reported descriptions of happy moments: words, concepts, and entities

This article attempts to study the language of happiness from a double perspective. First, the impact and relevance of sentiment words and expressions in self-reported descriptions of happiness are examined. Second, the sources of happiness that are mentioned in such descriptions are identified. A large sample of “happy moments” from the HappyDB corpus is processed employing advanced text analytics techniques. The sentiment analysis results reveal that positive lexical items have a limited role in the description of happy moments. For the second objective, unsupervised machine learning algorithms are used to extract and cluster keywords and manually label the resulting semantic classes. Results indicate that these classes, linguistically materialized in compact lexical families, accurately describe the sources of happiness, a result that is reinforced by our named entities analysis, which also reveals the important role that commercial products and services play as a source of happiness. Thus, this study attempts to provide methodological underpinnings for the automatic processing of self-reported happy moments, and contributes to a better understanding of the linguistic expression of happiness, with interdisciplinary implications for fields such as affective content analysis, sentiment analysis, and cultural, social and behavioural studies."Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación. proyecto de investigación PID2020-115310RB-I0

Exploring the Role of Aggressor’s Social Class in Rape and Its Relation to Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance.

Política de acceso abierto tomada de: https://beta.sherpa.ac.uk/id/publication/9304The purpose of this research was to analyze whether the social class of the aggressor and the degree of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance influence the blaming of the victim in a case of rape suffered by a woman. Participating in the study was a sample of 216 university students (82 men and 136 women). The participants read a rape scenario in which the aggressor’s social class was manipulated (high social class vs. low social class) and responded to a questionnaire about the blame of the victim, a questionnaire about right-wing authoritarianism, and a questionnaire about social dominance. The results show that the victim was blamed more when the aggressor was from a low social class and when the participants had high scores in right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance. They also reflect an interaction between the social class of the aggressor and social dominance: Participants who scored high in social dominance blamed the victim more when the aggressor was from a low social class

Biographical feminisms: contributions from the history of science

Este texto recupera la biografía como estudio histórico cuyo aporte historiográfico contribuye a una transformación de la historia de la ciencia desde la perspectiva de las mujeres. Con ese fin, se repasa aquí la historiografía sobre las mujeres en las ciencias, las tecnologías y la medicina, los estudios que las incluyen y los conceptos y metodologías que esos estudios manejan. Presentamos algunas de las propuestas más sugerentes de lo que podríamos denominar una epistemología histórica feminista de las ciencias, que estudia las estrategias de adaptación y las fuentes de autoridad de las mujeres. Esta propuesta se apoya en un conjunto de trabajos recientes sobre la relación entre biografía e historia, sobre la creación cultural de un rol público del conocimiento experto y sobre los procesos de construcción de identidad y pertenencia que ofrecen las biografías de científicas, médicas y tecnólogas.This essay aims at bringing back biography as an analytical work that provides historical and historiographical pathways towards a transformation of the history of science from a women?s perspective. We review here the historiography of women in the sciences, technologies and medicine, the studies that include them and the concepts and methods used. We present some of the most insightful proposals of what we would define as a feminist historical epistemology of the sciences that analyses women?s strategies of adaptation and the sources of authority they resort to. Such a proposal relies on a set of recent studies on the relationship between biography and history, on the public role of scientific cultures and on the processes of constructing identity and belonging offered by the biographies of woman scientists, physicians and technologists