ABSTRACT
Developments in computer science and the social sciences have made it possible to track public behaviour and opinion through online records that are refreshed minute-by-minute. A great deal of attention has been devoted to the development of data analysis tools that focus on “user-generated” content that appears on people’s online micro-blogging and social networking sites. During the “Internet era”, in which large parts of people’s lives have moved from the physical world onto a parallel digital realm, more and more of us are providing public declarations about ourselves. Natural language comments made online can sometimes replicate fairly accurately offline open-ended comments about the same things. Comparisons of opinions expressed about the same objects in face-to-face in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and chatter in online forums reveal that the different methods can yield similar results. Automated language “reading” programs could be written that could detect computational linguistic personality indicators.
