Digital communication technologies have become so sophisticated, persuasive, and intimate that they influence our very nature, our sense of self and how we express our identities. While acknowledging the tremendous space in communication that they have actualized, it is also important to critically engage with the influence that they have on our personal sphere.
Focusing on the multiple levels of analysis by the cohort of academics, in their roles as experts and educators, this research investigates the personal experience that they have of ICTs, and how they express aspects of the self over social media platforms. It combines a qualitative and quantitative mixed method design in two parallel phases. The first uses semi-structured interviews to gather testimonies about the relationship of academics with ICT, and then analyzes this data with grounded theory and NVivo in order to detect patterns and extract novel themes. The second employs computational linguistic techniques to study what academics say on social media platforms, specifically how they manifest themes identified in the qualitative study.
This paper will mainly focus on the second phase: what academics express on Twitter as their preferred communication platform. On the one hand, it will detail the methods used, as well as the challenges faced by a digital humanist at a computing institute in Japan; on the other, it will outline some of the more significant findings. Recent studies in social psychology have shown that what people say online, in its magnitude as “big data”, allows us to capture and predict personality traits, using for instance the Five Factor Model and sentiment analysis. Accordingly, this paper will discuss the application of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques to a humanistic study. It will also describe how such computational techniques can inform and complement thick qualitative descriptions of the subjective experience.