The construction of social emotions maps, which we often say, is something that more and more people are studying and applying! It is not simply to look at whether you are happy or not, but to collect the emotions in your heart, such as happiness, anger, sadness, fear, etc. in a certain period of time, and then draw them like a map or make them into charts in a visible way, so that you can understand at a glance what everyone's emotions are, where they are distributed, and why there are such emotional changes. This thing sounds quite mysterious, but in fact it can be used in many places, such as doing urban planning, wanting to know which public facilities residents are satisfied with; or conducting market research to see what a new product is; even in the field of public health, you can find some signs of problems in advance, such as whether large-scale anxiety is spreading or something!
1. Where does the data come from? This is a big problem! The most common use is to scoop up information online, such as Weibo posts, WeChat Moments, and comments in the comment area, which can be counted; and also to do questionnaires to ask everyone how they feel recently; sometimes they also use some specialized equipment, such as facial recognition in certain public places, but be careful about this, don’t violate other people’s privacy, and pay attention to compliance issues!
2. How to distinguish emotions? You can’t rely on people to read the words one by one to say that this is excitement or peace? That won't be exhausted! Nowadays, computers are used to develop a technology called natural language processing, which is to teach machines to understand human words, and then score paragraphs and sentences to mark whether they are positive, negative, or neutral. Sometimes they can also be subdivided into more specific emotions, such as "surprise" and "disgust"!
3. What should you pay attention to when drawing it? The color must be chosen correctly. Generally, red may represent anger and excitement. Blue may represent calmness and sadness. Green may mean happiness and positiveness. Of course, it is not fixed. It depends on the specific situation! Then the division of regions on the map is also very important. Should they be divided according to administrative areas or by the hot spots of people's activities? If you don’t divide well, it will be messy and it won’t explain any problem!
4. What is the use of analyzing the results? It's so useful! For example, if negative emotions suddenly increase in some place, is there any recent incident? Like environmental pollution? Or is the traffic too congested? If you find the reason, you can find a way to solve it! For companies, if you look at where people praise their own products and where they criticize them, you can adjust your sales strategy and improve your products. Yes! Provide global procurement services for weak current intelligent products!
Q: Is this difficult? Can ordinary people try a small range by themselves?
Answer: It is difficult to say it is difficult! The difficulty is that there is too much data, it is difficult to process, and emotions are very subjective. Sometimes machines will misjudgment and treat slanderous words as good words! But to be simple, there are also simple ways! If you want to try it out, you can use some ready-made online tools and don’t make the data too large. For example, analyze the topics that everyone has discussed the most recently in the owner group of your community. What is your mood? It’s not that bad, but the result may not be so professional and accurate!
Q: Will this thing violate personal privacy? For example, if I take what I say and analyze it, I don’t know!
Answer: Privacy issues really need to be considered! However, generally, this analysis is done using public data or data that is promised to be used, and it will not dig up the encrypted or unavailable things. Moreover, when analyzing, you will not specify a certain person. You will summarize the emotions of a large group of people, so you don’t have to worry too much about personal information being leaked. Of course, you still have to abide by the rules when obtaining data and don’t do it randomly!
I personally think that as long as this thing is used well, don’t use it on evil ways. It is quite helpful for us to understand society and solve some practical problems. It is a promising technical direction! I also hope that the technology will become more and more mature in the future, and it will more accurately and conveniently capture and understand our joys, angers, sorrows, and happiness!
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