Translator: Raimonds Jaks Reviewer: Denise RQ
How do you feel today?
How, do you think, people next to you feel?
Or in front of you?
Or right behind you?
Have you ever felt that the air is electrified?
That people have some common mood that makes them move as one?
Love is in the air.
Remember that particular day last summer?
Or that other day, when they were all saying that it smelled like trouble?
Yes, it sometimes does,
but how can we be sure?
Maybe it is just our individual fears or hormones
playing a trick on our brain?
Maybe it's just us who are somehow more elevated or frustrated,
and this something in the air is just an illusion.
Is there a way to check?
Is there a way to measure it?
Well, we at Riga Stradiņš University
together with colleagues from the University of Latvia
have built a machine
that attempts at measuring this trouble that lingers in the air.
To get there, we use the old archeological method
of digging in the dirt.
It all started one autumn evening, but not from dirt at all.
My friend and I were sipping the good old Latvian beer,
while contemplating the recent trends in the digital world.
And in that moment of clarity, we suddenly realized
that thousands and again thousands of people
are creating a wealth of text every day,
and displaying it on the Internet for public scrutiny.
Could we somehow use those texts to say something about our society?
From the previous research we know
that people use particular words
when in particular states of mind.
So, if we could gather all those texts and properly analyze them,
we could indeed say something about this commonly shared mood.
Said is done, as we say in Latvian.
So, in a while, we built that machine.
Did I do it alone?
No, of course not.
Because not only emotions but also ideas are collectively created and shared.
The University of Latvia Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence
has a long experience in analyzing texts in written or spoken form.
My colleagues at Riga Stradiņš University
are linguists and communication specialists
so we combined all that knowledge to design the machine.
In addition, we also persuaded three leading news portals
to make a script that would send all the comments to our servers every day.
So, this is how it works:
I mentioned digging in the dirt.
We use the comments posted on the Internet news sites.
Many people scorn at those comments,
because they seem rude and aggressive.
The authors of the comments certainly do not represent the whole society.
They are not even representative of the average reader of the portals.
Perhaps they are more troubled, perhaps they just have something more to say,
but they are members of our society.
If there is some kind of emotion lingering in the air,
it must be affecting them in the same way it affects anybody else.
So, just like archeologists who dig the centuries old rubbish pit
are not interested in the rubbish itself,
we are not interested in the meanings of the comments themselves,
but in what the words that are used in those comments can tell us about
the emotions under the influence of which the comments were written.
We compiled a list of all the words
that are used by the authors of the comments.
It was 65,000 words long.
And out of this list of 65,000 words,
we selected 800 keywords linked to aggressiveness
starting from words that directly invite to an aggressive act
and ending with words that just indicate some proximity to aggressiveness.
All the comments, every day,
are sent directly to our servers.
The computer ignores the meaning of the messages of the comments.
It just throws all the words into one big pile,
In a pot,
and the rest is just counting percentages
of how many aggression-linked words are there in that pot.
So, out of the pile of messy texts and words,
we distill a single dot everyday.
So, what did we find?
First of all, most of the peaks are related to local events.
If our machine was registering temperature,
we could say that the hottest month in the year is March.
It is clearly linked to one single event:
the so-called March of Legionaries that happens on the 16th of March.
It is a time when a small number of veterans
from the Latvian Legion in the Nazi army
walks through the old town of Riga
together with their young admirers.
Lots of press coverage,
revival of the Second World War;
angry words hit high level.
But not all levels are related to media events such as those.
Right before this hottest month of the year,
there is a period of relatively low level of aggressiveness.
It lasts from the end of November till the end of January.
Apparently, Latvians calm down
around the middle of winter
regardless what happens in the public sphere.
We gather data since May, 2011.
And so, here it is: the complete diagnostic chart
of our aggressive environment since May, 2011 till yesterday.
It is the entire history
of our frustration, pain, anger, and aggressiveness
projected on a single line
or three lines, as a matter of fact.
The green represents daily ups and downs.
The red is a smoother several days average,
so you can see some tendencies.
And the yellow horizontal line is the all time average.
Above it, means more than usual,
below it, means less than usual.
It is what can be described as rather noisy data,
but let me take you on a tour through it.
The line starts in May, 2011.
The whole rest of the year is comparatively even
with only minor ups and downs.
Winter is mild.
But then, the tensions build up,
and we arrive to the highest point of the year,
the infamous 16th of March.
Remember, the March of legionaries.
Then,
the line descends slowly over several months
back to the previous level,
when at the beginning of June
some talks of corruption appear,
and we experience a brief elevation that ends right before the Midsummer festival.
The emotional climate of the rest of the year
has nothing unusual to report on
with typically, calm moods around December
extending into January and parts of February,
but then, in anticipation of the infamous peak of the year,
the line climbs and shoots up,
reaches the summit, and gets the award
of the third highest point in the history
on the 16th of March.
Then the line drops back again,
and in general, keeps dropping until the end of July
when some news from the violence and military conflict in Syria seep in,
and by the end of August gets combined
with some Hollywood-style chasing of an armed bandit in Eastern Latvia;
the line seems to be getting back
to the usual low in the middle of winter, in January.
But the events and violence in Ukraine
influence moods in Latvia, as well.
So, the level is higher.
A serious climb is experienced already in February
with news from Euromaidan in Ukraine, in Kiev.
The 16th of March is still a peak,
but it gets swallowed by other peaks,
and this time, on this day,
not only some old men walk through the streets of Riga
but also a referendum takes place in Crimea,
and two days later,
the Ukrainian peninsula is annexed by Russia.
The rest of the year is spent in high tones,
mostly due to events in Ukraine.
On the 2nd of May,
the line reaches to the second highest point of all time,
when 200 people are burnt alive in a building in fire
in the Ukrainian city of Odessa during protests.
But the end of the year
is again a moment of serenity.
The line starts climbing again
in the second part of January.
The main topic of conversations for some time now
is whether Russia would actually attack us,
and if it did,
whether we would seek refuge, and where we would go.
People make preparations.
Some transfer their money to banks in Western Europe.
On the 28th of February,
Russian politician Boris Nemtsov is shot dead in the center of Moscow.
And the line reaches its absolutely highest point of all times.
On this background, the 16th of March becomes insignificant.
And the line seems to be slipping down
as it usually does at this time of the year.
Yesterday it was 3.8 -- still above average.
But among all those peaks,
do you know which is my favorite point?
This one:
the 30th of June, 2012
- the all time lowest point.
I looked up in my calendar.
Do you know what I found?
Nothing.
(Laughter)
I then tweeted about it.
And some people actually remembered what they did on that day.
For some, it was eating strawberries on the roof.
For some, it was repairing their bike in the garage.
For me, it was just enjoying the summer day
together with some guests in the countryside.
So, now we know.
We have measured the temperature.
But what comes next?
For one, we can test some hypotheses.
For instance, I already know what some of you might be thinking
that the lunar cycle has something to do with it.
That some, at least some of those peaks
must be related to the full moon.
Well, we tested that.
And we found absolutely no relation whatsoever.
(Applause)
You might be thinking that the authors of the comments are lunatics,
but if they are, the Moon has no influence upon their minds.
(Laughter)
Well, you might not be totally convinced
by the story that I have been conveying to you here.
That's fine
because I'm not 100% convinced myself.
But if you have an idea, maybe you want to test that idea,
maybe you just want to look at the numbers,
or the actual texts behind those numbers,
and many other interesting things.
I invite you to come to the website of our machine
and see for yourself.
Take a scoop of dirt
and distill it to the crystal of understanding.
Thank you.
(Applause)