Analysis of Sentiments in Social Media Interactions

Vega Economics was retained to support Dr. Lauren Gawne, an expert in linguistics, in a securities litigation. The engagement involved analyzing the language and emoji used by a Defendant in certain public statements, as well as analyzing the social media response this language elicited.

In her report, Dr. Gawne used Multimodal Discourse Analysis to analyze the at-issue language, and then performed a thematic analysis of certain replies to this language using both qualitative and quantitative criteria. Dr. Gawne also performed a programmatic analysis of the sentiments expressed in a large dataset of posts and comments from certain online forums, determining that both the illocutionary and perlocutionary force of the Defendant’s language had the effect of expressing confidence in the at-issue security.

Dr. Gawne is a linguistics expert and Senior Lecturer at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research includes a focus on multimodal communication, including the way individuals use gestures with speech and emojis with text. Her research expertise in gesture studies and in tracking knowledge in interaction has developed into a specialization that also includes online interaction. Dr. Gawne has also studied emoji use in particular online communities and is a member of Unicode’s Emoji Standard and Research Working Group.