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MIT Researcher Deb Roy Maps Comments in Social Media

Deb Roy, researcher at MIT, has during the last 3 years been filming every room in his house to capture “the birth of a word”. The idea behind the experiment was to see how his, at the time, new born son learns words and put the together into a language. Deb has created a “time machine” that allows him and his team to go back and forth between moments during those 3 years. The data compiles to over 90,000 hours of video (takes up more than 200 terabytes!) where every word and movement can be mapped against time. Deb is able to analyse how his son’s word “gaaaa” develops into the word “water”, but the project has created many new possibilities in mapping words as comments.
The research team has (using the same method) started mapping comments in social media and compared it with TV feeds. In doing this you will get a visual of how subjects in TV translate into comments in social media and vica versa. This new way of mapping comments could be used by many different institutions in the future. Political parties, innovators/entrepreneurs and parts of the advertising business and media world would/should find this very interesting!