STONY BROOK, N.Y., Oct. 19, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — The Computational Social Science of Emerging Realities Group announced today the release of a data visualization exploring the use of personal pronouns on social media. They observed that use of the phrases she/her, he/him and they/them within Twitter profile biographies has increased significantly within the last few years. They found that she/her is more prevalent than he/him, which in turn is more prevalent than they/them. Prevalence of the word "pronouns" also increased.
The Computational Social Science of Emerging Realities Group (CSSERG) studies identity by measuring the prevalence of terms in profile biographies. Prevalence is a numerical representation of the popularity of a term within users’ autobiographical text. It answers the question: Out of 10,000 users, about how many include X in their biography? X can be any word or phrase that signals an aspect of identity. The research group identifies and examines aggregate trends in the population to describe how personally expressed identity is changing over time. For instance, their previous research has shown users’ self-descriptions are increasingly political.
CSSERG is studying the growth in popularity of indicating personal pronouns online. They have released this preliminary analysis for International Pronouns Day 2021. International Pronouns Day is an annual event with the purpose of making commonplace asking, sharing, and respecting personal pronouns.
CSSERG is a group of scholars committed to cross-disciplinary collaboration, united by common computational methodologies and always with eyes on the near future. Dr. Jason Jeffrey Jones is the group’s director. Regarding this work, Dr. Jones says, "Data point to pronoun prevalence growing faster than any other term we have studied. Words such as ‘Twitch’ and ‘podcast’ have seen rapid growth in prevalence recently but not as much as pronouns. Personally expressed identity is a dynamic social phenomenon and deserves further study."
Dr. Jones has distributed the visualization under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. This means anyone is free to re-distribute, modify, and otherwise use the visualization as long as they attribute credit to the source. Data and code to reproduce the results are available at https://osf.io/4h8jk/. A more detailed description of the methods used is available at https://osf.io/4h8jk/wiki/Visualization%20for%20International%20Prounouns%20Day%202021/
Contact:
Dr. Jason Jeffrey Jones
Director of the Computational Social Science of Emerging Realities Group (CSSERG)
216-409-0835
321596@email4pr.com
https://jasonjones.ninja/csserg/
SOURCE Dr. Jason Jeffrey Jones
