Sharing enthusiasm online

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Anatoily Gruzd with one of his team's visualizations of听online conversation during the 2010听Vancouver Olympics听(Bruce Bottomley photo)

Few shared experiences unite and divide people like sports do: team versus team, province versus province, events like the Canada Games provide an opportunity to celebrate success, line up behind teams of choice and 鈥榬ah rah鈥� right to the podium.

That enthusiasm is often contagious when you鈥檙e sitting in the stands. But does the same hold true when you鈥檙e sitting at your computer screen?

Anatoliy Gruzd, assistant professor with the School of Information Management, tried to answer that question during last year鈥檚 Vancouver Olympics. The director of the school鈥檚 Social Media Lab, he and his team analyzed over 46,000 Twitter posts, or 鈥榯weets,鈥� to assess what sort of messages were most likely to be shared by others. One year later, they鈥檙e doing a similar analysis of online discussion about the Canada Games here in Halifax.

鈥淭he idea came from a study on face-to-face communities, where they found that happiness, in face-to-face communities, was three degrees contagious鈥攁 friend of a friend of a friend can influence if you鈥檙e happy or unhappy,鈥� says Dr. Gruzd. 鈥淪o we wanted to see how this is happening in online communities, where people may not be so closely associated.鈥�

The research ties into the lab鈥檚 work on visualizing large-scale online communities and conversation. Twitter is a great environment to work in, explains Dr. Gruzd, because it covers a wide geographic area, its data is mostly public and information travels incredibly fast. As for focusing on sporting events, it鈥檚 that they鈥檙e a place ripe for emotional expression.

鈥淭he Winter Olympics was a global event, with lots of media attention and online discussion, but it鈥檚 also where we鈥檇 expect to see both positive and negative emotions expressed: celebrating victory, being upset over defeat and everything in between.鈥�

After collecting the Twitter posts, Dr. Gruzd and his team use sentiment analysis software to assess the degree to which a tweet is positive or negative. After manually reviewing to ensure the sentiments were correctly analyzed, the team then builds user maps to track the flow of conversation and the topics discussed.

鈥淲hat we found is that even though most of the messages were neutral鈥攊nformational, sharing photos or stories鈥攊f you just look at the messages that express emotion, there were three times more positive ones than negative. And they were three times more likely to be re-tweeted, on average.鈥�

Dr. Gruzd is keen to see whether the Canada Games鈥� conversations follow similar patterns. His lab has already published , finding a loyal and tightly-knit community of Twitter users readily retweeting positive messages about the Games. The Social Media lab plans to produce three more reports through to the end of the games, which will be shared here at Dal News.

You can also keep track of online conversation about the Canada Games at .

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