{"id":60,"date":"2013-01-31T22:43:50","date_gmt":"2013-02-01T06:43:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/bronco27\/?p=60"},"modified":"2013-02-01T11:18:49","modified_gmt":"2013-02-01T19:18:49","slug":"svenja-adolphs-a-lesson-on-linguistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/bronco27\/2013\/01\/31\/svenja-adolphs-a-lesson-on-linguistics\/","title":{"rendered":"Svenja Adolphs: A Lesson on Data Mining"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Facebook: Connecting the World<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

The world is more connected today than ever before.\u00a0 Some might like for this to mean that each human being is emotionally more connected to others.\u00a0 However, the recent mass shootings in Aurora and Newtown, as well as a national shift towards emphasizing behavioral health may actually suggest that people feel more lonely and depressed, even though we are supposedly more \u201cconnected.\u201d\u00a0 In my opinion, to be connected in today\u2019s world means to be connected in cyber space.\u00a0 It means to constantly be connected to a gadget, such as a smart phone, tablet, or laptop; it means to receive alerts and notifications every few minutes about what is happening in everyone else\u2019s world; it means to befriend people you have never met before on websites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn; it means to share your life with them through photos, messages, videos, and emails.\u00a0 Ultimately, it means to be connected to the world through cyber space, while actually being connected to nobody in the real world.<\/p>\n

This phenomenon has resulted in a massive amount of data stored in cyber space, created when one user shares information with another.\u00a0 Facebook users, for example, had stored 40 billion photos on the site by the year 2010.\u00a0 This number continues to grow each day.\u00a0 The website then takes this immense data mine and uses complex software programs to analyze it to a degree no human being can.\u00a0 This software finds user trends and patterns, areas of opportunity for the website, user preferences, and future trends.\u00a0 They use these findings to be able to get the right advertisements and the right information to the right person, thus maximizing their profits and the advertiser\u2019s profits.\u00a0 However, this concept is not unique to Facebook, and is in fact used by numerous industries, including linguistics, where corpora, or collections of electronic texts, are analyzed using computers.<\/p>\n

Electronic text analysis allows us to manipulate language data in various ways to suit a particular research purpose.\u00a0 The use of software tools in this process leads to more accurate and consistent results in a very short amount of time.\u00a0 Once the data has been sorted in an accessible way\u2026we can carry out further analysis on the data.\u00a0 This analysis again helps to identify patterns that we might not be able to describe purely on an intuitive basis.\u00a0 This includes the analysis of whether a word carries positive or negative connotations. \u00a0(Introducing Electronic Analysis<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This field of electronic analysis is especially important to me, as I regularly use the internet and social networking sites.\u00a0 At the same time, I believe virtual connections are much weaker than personal ones. However, it often feels like a necessity to have access to social networking sites in order to stay connected to on-campus activities, student groups, and class acquaintances. When searching my name on search engines like Google, five to six different links show up being related to my name. Was I the one to post them? No, but this world of cyber space.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, I did not realize that there was an entire industry behind what I thought was amazing when advertisements began appearing on my Google page that were specific to my search terms.\u00a0 Websites such as Facebook are able to create a unique experience by customizing what the user sees based on what it feels would be of most interest to that particular user. As seen in the movie, Social Network<\/em>, the rudimentary basis behind Facebook was to create the college social experience online for people.<\/p>\n

Even more personally, I recently learned that the Santa Clara University student body petitioned for an honor code.\u00a0 There is sure to be verbiage in this honor code specific to plagiarism and academic integrity.\u00a0 Electronic text analysis would crucial to properly enforcing this entire honor code, as the software would critically analyze each student\u2019s work and find matches in diction even when text may be summarized or changed slightly.\u00a0 The field is extremely vast, and I am eager to see how it will continue to develop in the coming years.<\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=lB95KLmpLR4<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The world is more connected today than ever before.\u00a0 Some might like for this to mean that each human being is emotionally more connected to others.\u00a0 However, the recent mass shootings in Aurora and Newtown, as well as a national … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":377,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"qubely_global_settings":"","qubely_interactions":"","kk_blocks_editor_width":"","_kiokenblocks_attr":"","_kiokenblocks_dimensions":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"gutentor_comment":4,"qubely_featured_image_url":null,"qubely_author":{"display_name":"bronco27","author_link":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/bronco27\/author\/bronco27\/"},"qubely_comment":4,"qubely_category":"Uncategorized<\/a>","qubely_excerpt":"The world is more connected today than ever before.\u00a0 Some might like for this to mean that each human being is emotionally more connected to others.\u00a0 However, the recent mass shootings in Aurora and Newtown, as well as a national … Continue reading →","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/bronco27\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/bronco27\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/bronco27\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/bronco27\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/377"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/bronco27\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/bronco27\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/bronco27\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions\/63"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/bronco27\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/bronco27\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/bronco27\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}