Modern & Im/material Things

“Data doesn’t spring full formed from nowhere. Data is created, generated, and recorded. And the unifying principle behind all of this data is that it was all created by humans. We create the data, so essentially our data is an extension of ourselves, an extension of our humanity.”

“The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves…We speak for them. Data-driven predictions can succeed — and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves.”

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“We worked with anonymized aggregated data to analyze usage trends,” Counts says. “We did not look at individual tweets because the goal was to map out characteristics of social-media mood expression. We were interested in discovering how often different types of moods were expressed, activity rates, and participatory patterns such as conversational engagement and information sharing. We achieved large-scale validations of what we knew of human moods, based on psychology literature, and also ran into quite a few surprises.”

One surprise was that, out of the 203 different moods, negative moods appeared more frequently than positive moods and covered a wider range of mood expressions. Furthermore, negative moods were usually of mid-level activation. Positive moods were less frequent than negative and represented a smaller range, but they tended to have high-level activation: words such as “win,” “happy,” and “ecstatic”occurred frequently.

“Media ecologies are processes of emergence of particular assemblages, which are discovered and participated in by following the activity of material processes. They are also conceptual devices that question the evolving couplings of humans, animals, networks, machines, the like of blog posts and emails, air and ‘ether’, and art, in order to fight the claustrophobia of fixed structures.”