Reflections prior to Theme 4

The paper I chose is called 'From humor recognition to irony detection: The figurative language of social media' (Reyes, Rosso, & Buscaldi, 2012). It's from the paper following the link below, and it has an impact factor of 1.115.
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/data-and-knowledge-engineering

The paper I chose investigates humor and irony in Twitter. Since humor and irony is subjective they came up with a method to collect quantitive data about it. They collected 50,000 tweets with hashtags '#humor' and '#irony' to analyze them using an algorithm. This method gave data in percentage regarding different aspects. They looked at ambiguity, polarity, unexpectedness, and emotional scenarios.

This method of collecting quantative data about something that's rather subjective is limited in the sense that it does not include human perception. Though it is a smart way to go about collecting huge amounts of data in that regard, and the solution to not having the human factor was new to me. They actually wanted to avoid the subjectiveness in this investigation.

I don't really know how they could've improved on using better quantitative methods since I've never seen this kind of method before. So I basically learned something new here! The way they measured polarity in each and every one of the tweets looked interesting.


After reading the paper by Ilias Bergström and colleagues I am to discuss two questions, namely:

Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?

Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

On a side not, I found the text to be interesting actually.

Carrying out a quantitative research can give you more objective data to work with. Seeing as it gives the author more room for their own opinions and how the perceive the actual facts. Quantitative methods can benefit researches where the goal is to see how many people that feel, and think in a certain way. It does not give an in-depth exploration of what people think, feel, and why. A quantitative method gives you more statistical findings. Usually when conducting an experiment with a quantitative method the participants might need to answer a survey which contains alternatives to choose from rather than free-text. This gives you statistical information about how people feel.

Qualitative methods gives you what a quantitative does not, and that was mentioned above. If the goal is to find out in-depth how people feel and think about something and why they feel/think that way then a qualitative method is the way to go. That is to say that you ask more questions, in an interview or a survey, that the participants can talk more freely in. [source]