Analytical Thinkers typically are searching for the truth and the truth often implies hard, cold facts. The NY Times article Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts might seem hypocritical but speaking from experience, “there’s gold in that ther’ text.” In the mid ’80s I managed a group of employee relations analysts that mined mountains of text in an attempt to quantify employee morale for a 10,000 person company. Out of this work came “ERATS” or the Employee Relations Attitude Tracking System. (We were really tracking morale but couldn’t come up with a good acronym with that pesky “M”. Sentiment analysis is exactly what we were trying to do but completely by hand.
An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.
Two recently devoured books on my shelf explore the web-analytics from a few angles. If you haven’t already, check out:
Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters
