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Marius, the giraffe: a comparative informatics case study of linguistic features of the social media discourse

Published: 20 August 2014 Publication History

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.

Supplementary Material

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Appendix: Top 100 Unigrams, Post Examples and Sentiment Heatmaps

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cover image ACM Conferences
CABS '14: Proceedings of the 5th ACM international conference on Collaboration across boundaries: culture, distance & technology
August 2014
154 pages
ISBN:9781450325578
DOI:10.1145/2631488
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 20 August 2014

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Author Tags

  1. comparative informatics
  2. computational linguistics
  3. grounded comparison
  4. sentiment analysis
  5. social data analytics
  6. social graph
  7. social text

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CABS '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 13 of 24 submissions, 54%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 13 of 24 submissions, 54%

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  • (2023)Anthropomorphism and “Viralability”Trophy Hunting10.1007/978-981-19-9976-5_7(323-340)Online publication date: 12-Apr-2023
  • (2021)Furred and feathered friends: How attached are zookeepers to the animals in their care?Zoo Biology10.1002/zoo.2165641:2(122-129)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
  • (2020)Software Support for Discourse-Based Textual Information Analysis: A Systematic Literature Review and Software Guidelines in PracticeInformation10.3390/info1105025611:5(256)Online publication date: 7-May-2020
  • (2019)Threat or treat for tourism organizations? The Copenhagen Zoo social media stormInternational Journal of Tourism Research10.1002/jtr.232222:1(108-119)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2019
  • (2016)Social Set Analysis: A Set Theoretical Approach to Big Data AnalyticsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2016.25595844(2542-2571)Online publication date: 2016
  • (2016)emotionVisProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Tackling Society's Grand Challenges with Design Science - Volume 966110.1007/978-3-319-39294-3_22(238-244)Online publication date: 23-May-2016
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  • (2015)Social Set Analysis of Corporate Social Media Crises on FacebookProceedings of the 2015 IEEE 19th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference10.1109/EDOC.2015.25(112-121)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2015

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