Spanish Superdialects on Twitter

1987

twitterBillions of tweets every day. Millions of users. Whether you like Twitter or not, it’s a powerful social network. Maybe you use it as well, and perhaps you think that the great number of gained followers makes you an expert, and it allows you to have a good general idea of what’s going on on the platform. You are partially wrong.

As a recent survey demonstrates, Twitter’s information can be used for massive online researches, with amazing, unexpected, scientifically relevant results. You can extract and analyze the language of millions of different, or similar, profiles. As well, other social network can be used for the same purpose. You maybe remember also the ambiguous psychological experiment done on 500 thousand unaware Facebook users, that proved that the stream of information displayed on the timeline can be contagious and can affect in a negative way the emotional side of the viewers. We are talking of course about big data, supercomputers, something that a simple user cannot deal with. But scientists and universities’ mainframes can. 

The University of Toulon in France and the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems on the island of Majorca, using Twitter and analyzing the data provided in two years by hundred thousand of users, proved the existence of so-called “spanish superdialects”, studying language relationships related to a rural or urban context, past migrations back to centuries, trends and sayings. And more research waits to be done, for the huge amount of relations that can be spotted out. Just click the link to find out more.        

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/529836/computational-linguistics-of-twitter-reveals-the-existence-of-global-superdialects/

By Matteo Poles

Social Media Specialist

Communication Trainee at TermCoord