Michael Arnold

Jonathan St-Onge, Ashley M. A. Fehr, Carter Ward et al.

Describing and comparing complex systems requires principled, theoretically grounded tools. Built around the phenomenon of type turbulence, allotaxonographs provide map-and-list visual comparisons of pairs of heavy-tailed distributions. Allotaxonographs are designed to accommodate a wide range of instruments including rank- and probability-turbulence divergences, Jenson-Shannon divergence, and generalized entropy divergences. Here, we describe a suite of programmatic tools for rendering allotaxonographs for rank-turbulence divergence in Matlab, Javascript, and Python, all of which have different use cases.

P. S. Dodds, T. Alshaabi, M. I. Fudolig et al.

We define `ousiometrics' to be the study of essential meaning in whatever context that meaningful signals are communicated, and `telegnomics' as the study of remotely sensed knowledge. From work emerging through the middle of the 20th century, the essence of meaning has become generally accepted as being well captured by the three orthogonal dimensions of evaluation, potency, and activation (EPA). By re-examining first types and then tokens for the English language, and through the use of automatically annotated histograms -- `ousiograms' -- we find here that: 1. The essence of meaning conveyed by words is instead best described by a compass-like power-danger (PD) framework, and 2. Analysis of a disparate collection of large-scale English language corpora -- literature, news, Wikipedia, talk radio, and social media -- shows that natural language exhibits a systematic bias toward safe, low danger words -- a reinterpretation of the Pollyanna principle's positivity bias for written expression. To help justify our choice of dimension names and to help address the problems with representing observed ousiometric dimensions by bipolar adjective pairs, we introduce and explore `synousionyms' and `antousionyms' -- ousiometric counterparts of synonyms and antonyms. We further show that the PD framework revises the circumplex model of affect as a more general model of state of mind. Finally, we use our findings to construct and test a prototype `ousiometer', a telegnomic instrument that measures ousiometric time series for temporal corpora. We contend that our power-danger ousiometric framework provides a complement for entropy-based measurements, and may be of value for the study of a wide variety of communication across biological and artificial life.

Anne Marie Stupinski, Thayer Alshaabi, Michael V. Arnold et al.

Mental health challenges are thought to afflict around 10% of the global population each year, with many going untreated due to stigma and limited access to services. Here, we explore trends in words and phrases related to mental health through a collection of 1- , 2-, and 3-grams parsed from a data stream of roughly 10% of all English tweets since 2012. We examine temporal dynamics of mental health language, finding that the popularity of the phrase 'mental health' increased by nearly two orders of magnitude between 2012 and 2018. We observe that mentions of 'mental health' spike annually and reliably due to mental health awareness campaigns, as well as unpredictably in response to mass shootings, celebrities dying by suicide, and popular fictional stories portraying suicide. We find that the level of positivity of messages containing 'mental health', while stable through the growth period, has declined recently. Finally, we use the ratio of original tweets to retweets to quantify the fraction of appearances of mental health language due to social amplification. Since 2015, mentions of mental health have become increasingly due to retweets, suggesting that stigma associated with discussion of mental health on Twitter has diminished with time.

Thayer Alshaabi, Jane L. Adams, Michael V. Arnold et al.

In real-time, social media data strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and day-to-day conversations by millions of ordinary people at a scale that is scarcely conventionalized and recorded. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, sharing and commenting mechanisms are native to social media platforms, enabling us to quantify social amplification (i.e., popularity) of trending storylines and contemporary cultural phenomena. Here, we describe Storywrangler, a natural language processing instrument designed to carry out an ongoing, day-scale curation of over 100 billion tweets containing roughly 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2021. For each day, we break tweets into unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams spanning over 100 languages. We track n-gram usage frequencies, and generate Zipf distributions, for words, hashtags, handles, numerals, symbols, and emojis. We make the data set available through an interactive time series viewer, and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. Although Storywrangler leverages Twitter data, our method of extracting and tracking dynamic changes of n-grams can be extended to any similar social media platform. We showcase a few examples of the many possible avenues of study we aim to enable including how social amplification can be visualized through 'contagiograms'. We also present some example case studies that bridge n-gram time series with disparate data sources to explore sociotechnical dynamics of famous individuals, box office success, and social unrest.