ABSTRACT
In this paper, we present the results of an initial experiment using emotion classifications as the basis for studying information dynamics in social media ('emodynamics'). To do this, we used Bert Emotion [18] to assign probability scores for eight different emotions to each text in a time series of 43 million Danish tweets from 2019-2022. We find that variance in the information signals novelty and resonance reliably identify seasonal shifts in posting behavior, particularly around the Christmas holiday season, whereas variance in the distribution of emotion scores corresponds to more local events such as major inflection points in the Covid-19 pandemic in Denmark. This work in progress suggests that emotion scores are a useful tool for diagnosing shifts in the baseline information state of social media platforms such as Twitter, and for understanding how social media systems respond to both predictable and unexpected external events. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to investigate how the MMR vaccine debate was framed as a matter of public trust or mistrust on Danish newspaper media. Our results, based on computational analysis of the information dynamics of 231 newspaper articles from 2001 to 2019 and subsequent qualitative framing analysis, provide additional information about MMR vaccination coverage in the three major Danish national newspapers, Politiken, Berlingske and Ekstrabladet. We used a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model to train article-level dense low-dimensional representations and explored the information dynamics using Nielbo et al.'s [1, 2] approach to change detection in news-based information signals. In addition, we used Entman [3] to identify and analyse frames that related to trust and mistrust of MMR vaccination. We found that the Danish MMR debate followed patterns of novelty and resonance that typify the expected dynamics of news reporting by legacy news media when news is not catastrophic or shocking [2]. Supporting this finding, the framing analysis showed that the three newspapers promoted vaccines as safe and valuable for society throughout the period. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from cultural studies, science studies, public health, computational humanities and media studies, this study presents a methodologically innovative approach to studying historical and near-real time framing of (mis)trust of vaccination in newspaper articles. Recent debates about the safety of Covid-19 vaccines underline the importance of quantifying and qualifying vaccine discourses and paying attention to legacy media's overall agenda-setting role. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)