The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [139]
234–235 Drops in suicide rates following terrorist attacks have been reported by Emad Salib and his colleagues. Additional findings about language and psychological changes following the subway bombings in Madrid in 2004 have been reported by Itziar Fernandez, Dario Paez, and me. The language changes in written essays among New Orleans residents after Hurricane Katrina were collected by Sandy Hartman.
238–239 A former graduate student of mine, Amy Gonzales, conducted a complex laboratory experiment where groups of students had to work together either in face-to-face groups or in online groups. The details are reported in Gonzales, Hancock, and Pennebaker (2010). A second project, which was described earlier, was run with business school students by Ethan Burris and his colleagues. The two lab studies are consistent with some fascinating real-world projects conducted by Paul Taylor and his colleagues. For example, Taylor found higher LSM levels in the transcripts of successful hostage negotiations between police and hostage-takers in the UK relative to unsuccessful hostage negotiations.
240–243 The Craigslist project is part of a larger study focusing on measures of community cohesiveness. The primary team members include Cindy Chung, Yla Tausczik, and me. We are indebted to Mark Hayward for his help in providing the relevant Gini statistics.
243–247 The word-catching research is based on an archive of tape recordings I have collected between 1990 and 2010. They include the anlayses of 1,162 conversational files of people in the real world having natural conversations. Discriminant analyses (for you statistics fans out there) show that cross-validation classifications are accurate at 80 to 84 percent for anywhere from five to seven settings, where 16 to 20 percent is chance.
248 One of my favorite language maps tracks the usage of the words pop, soda, and Coke as generic names for soft drinks. Check out www.popvssoda.com.
248–253 One of the giants in the world of sociolinguistics is William Labov from the University of Pennsylvania. Labov has pioneered ways to track how word usage and accents change across regions and time. Some of his early work, for example, examined language differences within blocks and neighborhoods of large cities. Later, he began to focus on much broader trends across the United States.
Due in large part to Labov’s influence, the University of Pennsylvania has taken an important lead in advancing our knowledge of social communication and language use. It houses the Linguistic Data Consortium, or LDC (www.ldc.upenn.edu), which houses one of the largest text archives in the world. In addition, Mark Liberman—a particularly thoughtful linguist—has created Language Log, a highly influential blog site (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu).
249–251 The This I Believe project has been growing in multiple directions. Cindy Chung, Jason Rentfrow, and I have been developing detailed maps of language use across the United States based on both function words and content words.
251–252 A particularly hot approach to text analysis examines how people use emotion words in their blogs, tweets, or other communications. Although sentiment analysis focuses only on people’s use of positive and negative emotion words, it can provide a general overview of the happiness of cities, regions, or entire countries. For a discussion, see the work of Adam Kramer, Jason Rentfrow, and also Alex Wright’s article in the New York Times. Also, check out a truly wonderful book by Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss, on one man’s attempt to understand why some countries are happier than others.
252 In deducing the linguistic fingerprint of the Texas high schools, discriminant analyses showed that we could accurately classify students at a 19 to 20 percent rate, where 11 percent was chance.
CHAPTER 10: WORD SLEUTHING
258–261 Matching blog entries to specific authors can be done in a number of