Projects
Sentiment in the news
Center for Advanced Internet Studies Fellowship programme (2023)
Interpreting sentiment analysis outputs to categorise emotions in news articles
Sentiment analysis (SA) is one of the techniques commonly used in Natural Language Processing. These algorithms classify words on a scale of sentiment that usually goes from negative to positive. These techniques have been mostly applied to Twitter data or customer feedback to track reception of products. However, researchers in the humanities have been using the algorithms to explore other kinds of text, such as news articles to understand the tone in which some media events are narrated.
This kind of use of the SA presents several challenges. Questions arise about the extent to which the SA scores are reliable or how they can be used for interpretation (qualitative analysis) and discourse analysis. This project aims to investigate how these techniques have been applied to the study of media events, identifying their limitations and potentialities, making use of explainable AI and qualitative analysis of SA outputs in a multilingual text corpus.
This project has received funding from CAIS via the Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen.
CLEOPATRA
The CLEOPATRA ITN, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network led by the L3S Research Center at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University of Hannover, aims to make sense of the massive digital coverage generated by the intense disruption in Europe over the past decade – including appalling terrorist incidents and the dramatic movement of refugees and economic migrants.
Nationalism, internationalism and sporting identity: the London and Rio Olympics
My research explored the media coverage of the Olympic Games in a cross-cultural, cross-lingual and temporal perspective. I was especially interested in comparing how the concept of ‘Olympic legacy’ has been approached by the Brazilian and British media considering different locations, languages and social-political contexts.
Project's documentation
1. The archived Olympics: exploring the narratives of Legacy in the UK Web Archive
Blog posts
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London’s Olympic Legacy: Local, National and International Aspirations, UK Web Archive Blog - British Library
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Exploring media events with Shine, UK Web Archive Blog - British Library
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Boris Johnson, fertility and the royal baby: how far does the concept of Olympic Legacy go?, UK Web Archive Blog - British Library
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What is left behind? Exploring the Olympic Games legacies through the UK Web Archive, UK Web Archive Blog - British Library
Podcast - Sport in History Podcast by the British Society of Sports History
Episode: Documenting the Olympics - GLAM sector and London 2012
Recording of the event organised by the British Library in collaboration with the British Society of Sports History (BSSH), the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University (ICSHC) and the School of Advanced Study (SAS)/CLEOPATRA project.
Videos
UK Web Archive conference 2022 - An event about web archiving aimed at staff from UK Legal Deposit Libraries.
Engaging with Web Archives Conference 2020
2. Unveiling the potentials and limitations of Sentiment analysis algorithms to study news media
Paper | Combining sentiment analysis classifiers to explore multilingual news articles covering the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympics
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 812997.
Activism and identity
Center for Advanced Internet Studies Fellowship programme (2018-2019)
#OccupyEstelita: the emergence of identity as part of a political performativity in the usage of Facebook Events by Social Movements
Many people who joined the Spanish 15-M, Occupy Wall Street and the Brazilian #OccupyEstelita used to recuse the word activist, arguing that this word could not represent their activities: virtual participation supporting Facebook Events, sharing information about the movement online and inviting virtual friends to be a part of the demonstrations. This project investigates the following question: How is the perception of a political self-identity affected by the usage of Social Networks? The main subject of study will be the usage of Facebook Events by manifestants from the Occupy Estelita movement in Brazil. The project has conducted in-depth interviews and questionnaires with movement’s supporters to understand how they perceive their online activities as part of a social mobilization aimed at physical presence on the street.
Project's documentation
CAIS Fellowship Report | #OccupyEstelita: The Emergence of Identity as Part of Political Performativity in the Use of Facebook Events by Social Movements
Paper | Facebook Event as a platform to promote engagement in social movements: Theory of performativity applied to social networks
Book Chapter (in Portuguese) | Performativity and conflicts between the occupation of real and virtual spaces: a study of the Facebook Events platform
This project has received funding from CAIS via the Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen.