Blog posts

Fakta - ny bok

Problem framing and experimental setup

This blog post explores the prevalent themes across multiple threads on the popular Swedish discussion forum Flashback, discussing COVID-19 vaccine and vaccination, using the topic modeling library BERTopic.

 

”Vaccin är ett fult o lömskt ord för att kunna lura friska människor till att injicera sjukdomar och död.”

As the COVID-19 virus became a pandemic in March 2020, the amount of (time-stamped written) data, such as news/newspaper reports, scientific articles, social media posts (e.g. blogs and twitter), surveys and other information about the virus and its symptoms, prevention, management and transmission became massively available. Such data contained both valid and reliable information, and relevant facts from trusted sources and also rumors, conspiracy theories and misinformation from unofficial ones.

A comment often received by the reviewers of manuscripts to scientific conferences and journals is one about the representative sample under scrutiny and whether there are any solid arguments for accepting that the population characteristics, and particularly the features extracted from the empirical data acquired from such a population (e.g. from speech production) provide sufficient or accurate enough information to use in various algorithmic approaches (e.g. in machine learning).