Edderkoppspinn eller nettverk: New media and the use of polar words in emotive contexts
Original version
SYNAPS - A Journal of Professional Communication 21(2008) pp.19-35Abstract
An adaptation of two well-established measures of changes in financial markets – return and volatility – is
presented for the analysis of changes in sentiment, articulated in text, towards specific groups of people or
towards an identifiable system of beliefs. The method used in this analysis of sentiments is based on the use of a
thesaurus of affect words and on the computation of the rate of change of these words over time in a
diachronically organized corpus of texts. A corpus based analysis of news about comprising Islam and Muslim
as keywords is presented covering three important periods – calendar years 1991, 1999 and 2007 (circa 700,000
words) from one of the most prestigious US-based newspapers, The New York Times.