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Computational Study of the Politics of Emotions: An Analysis of Curiosity and Outrage in Online PlatformsAuthor: lasya.venneti Date: 2018-08-14 Report no: IIIT/TH/2018/66 Advisor:Aniket Alam AbstractThe thesis brings out technology impact on the two key political processes viz. news reporting and public protests. In the first part theoretical models are developed for the attention seeking ability of the news headlines online, based on the theories of human curiosity termed as the information seeking behaviour without utilitarian motive. A classifier is built to identify the clickbaity headlines indicating high degree of curiosity they generated in reader’s mind. The methodology is also used to study the headline dataset scraped and collated from the digital newspaper start-ups in India for their ability to attract reader views and attention. News headline gets spotted by the reader for the novelty of the topic, it creates surprise in readers’ mind by the choice of word arrangements used. Headline stoking optimal reader anticipation attracts a click pointing to its autonomous significance independent of the narrative. Finally headline’s structural, syntactic and semantic features create information gap in reader’s mind, by elevating the information reference point and the headline which is ”self-important”, salient, and promises to close the information gap piques reader curiosity and triggers clicking behaviour. The work also computationally validates a century old postulate about the relationship between curiosity and stimulus levels by computing novelty and surprise from Facebook reader response to news headlines. We have plotted the curious responses of reactions, shares and comments against the stimuli causing novelty and surprise to check their impact on the reader curiosity. The result of inverted ”U” curve, is as per the psychological modelling done during late 19th century by Wilhelm Wundt hypothesizing intermediate arousal potential. The second part of the thesis brings out the biography of public outrage online by computationally analyzing two recent incidents viz. Jyoti Singh incident(2012) at Delhi and murder of noted journalist Gauri Lankesh(2017). This study has tried to prise-open the manner in which online outrage builds up and evolves into politically meaningful public conversations. It suggests that outrage by itself has a short life, is intense in its expression but dies quickly. However, it appears that where it builds on a certain robust mapping of emotions and incidents to each other, it has a good chance to develop an afterlife as a larger public conversation, and thus impacts politics. Full thesis: pdf Centre for Exact Humanities |
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