publications

2024

1. Political uses of the ancient past on social media are predominantly negative and extreme

   Chiara Bonacchi, Jessica Witte, and Mark Altaweel

   PLOS ONE, Sep 2024

   Abs DOI

   This study assesses whether references to the ancient past in debates about political issues on social media over-represent negative and extreme views. Using precision-recall, we test the performance of three sentiment analysis methods (VADER, TextBlob and Flair Sentiment) on a corpus of 1,478,483 posts, comments and replies published on Brexit-themed Facebook pages between 2015 and 2017. Drawing on the results of VADER and manual coding, we demonstrate that: 1) texts not containing keywords relating to the Iron Age, Roman and medieval (IARM) past are mostly neutral and 2) texts with IARM keywords express more negative and extreme sentiment than those without keywords. Our findings show that mentions of the ancient past in political discourse on multi-sided issues on social media are likely to indicate the presence of hostile and polarised opinions.

2023

1. Measuring the Rise and Fall of a Subreddit using Text Analytics: The Life Course of r/Antiwork

   Ari Stillman, and Jessica Witte

   In 2023 10th International Conference on Behavioural and Social Computing (BESC), Sep 2023

   DOI

2022

1. The fasting girl: A literary, digital, and medical history of anorexia from the novel to the clinic (1740-1900)

   Jessica Witte

   University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Mar 2022

   ORCID: 0000-0003-1144-8065

2020

1. The ‘Welsh Fasting Girls’ and anorexia nervosa in the Victorian medical imagination

   Jessica Witte

   Journal of Literature and Science, Mar 2020

   Publisher’s PDF, also known as Version of record. Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer

   DOI
2. NovelTM Datasets for English-Language Fiction, 1700-2009

   Ted Underwood, Patrick Kimutis, and Jessica Witte

   Journal of Cultural Analytics, May 2020

   DOI
3. Book Reviews and the Consolidation of Genre

   Kent Chang, Yuerong Hu, Wenyi Shang, and 5 more authors

   In DH2020, Ottawa (virtually), Jul 2020

   DOI (newest version): 10.17613/vn3nd-4c168

   DOI