Edderkoppspinn eller nettverk: New media and the use of polar words in emotive contexts

Abstract

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.