An important part of our information-gathering behavior has always been to find out what other people think. With the growing availability and popularity of opinion-rich resources such as online review sites and personal blogs, new opportunities and challenges arise as people now can, and do, actively use information technologies to seek out and understand the opinions of others. The sudden eruption of activity in the area of opinion mining and sentiment analysis, which deals with the computational treatment of opinion, sentiment, and subjectivity in text, has thus occurred at least in part as a direct response to the surge of interest in new systems that deal directly with opinions as a first-class object.

This survey covers techniques and approaches that promise to directly enable opinion-oriented information-seeking systems. Our focus is on methods that seek to address the new challenges raised by sentiment-aware applications, as compared to those that are already present in more traditional fact-based analysis. We include material on summarization of evaluative text and on broader issues regarding privacy, manipulation, and economic impact that the development of opinion-oriented information-access services gives rise to. To facilitate future work, a discussion of available resources, benchmark datasets, and evaluation campaigns is also provided.

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Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis

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Science in action : How to follow scientists and engineers through society

This paper outlines a new approach to the study of power, that of the sociology of translation. Starting from three principles, those of agnosticism (impartiality between actors engaged in controversy), generalised symmetry (the commitment to explain conflicting viewpoints in the same terms) and free association (the abandonment of all a priori distinctions between the natural and the social), the paper describes a scientific and economic controversy about the causes for the decline in the population of scallops in St. Brieuc Bay and the attempts by three marine biologists to develop a conservation strategy for that population. Four ‘moments’ of translation are discerned in the attempts by these researchers to impose themselves and their definition of the situation on others: (a) problematisation: the researchers sought to become indispensable to other actors in the drama by denning the nature and the problems of the latter and then suggesting that these would be resolved if the actors negotiated the ‘obl...

Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay

Confirmation bias, as the term is typically used in the psychological literature, connotes the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a h...

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Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises:

https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/files/6761018/Geels02technological.pdf

Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes: a multi-level perspective and a case-study

This paper is intended as a contribution to the sociology of skill. Research which suggests that skills and their transmission are the properties of communities leaves unanswered the question of how information may be explicitly transmitted and acquired as part of the process of leaning a skill. Second-order studies of skill accept that skill acquisition occurs within a culture, but then go on to examine in detail which aspects of skills can be explicated and which cannot. Such a second-order study is presented here. Observations of veterinary surgery are used to identify a quasi-quantitative measure of skill acquisition – hardness. This measure is useful in understanding how task uncertainty is resolved in practice and how new skills are learnt.

Inside knowledge: second order measures of skill

This lecture traces the theme of opening black boxes in the sociology of science. It is argued that now sociologists have got inside the black box of science, they need to make more impact upon the...

Opening Black Boxes: Science, Technology and Society:

The debate surrounding the introduction of new musical instruments is examined as a way to elicit norms underlying musical practice and culture. The paper details the introduction of three twentieth century instruments: the player piano, the "noise instruments" of the futurists and the electronic music synthesizer. The responses to these new instruments both among classical performers and in the realm of popular culture reveal how traditional norms of musical creativity associated with personal achievement have been supplemented with new norms of democratized leisure and how with the emergence of the noise instruments and synthesizer a new value has been placed upon "uncertainty recontrolled". The paper explores the tension between continuity and change in regard to these musical norms and values.

'Should One Applaud?': Breaches and Boundaries in the Reception of New Technology in Music

Dr. Golem explores some of the mysteries and complexities of medicine while untangling the inherent conundrums of scientific research and highlighting its vagaries. In eight chapters devoted to case studies of modern medicine, Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch consider the prevalence of tonsillectomies, the placebo effect and randomized control trials, bogus doctors, CPR, the efficacy of vitamin C in fighting cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, AIDS cures, and vaccination. Throughout, Collins and Pinch remind readers that medical science is an economic as well as a social consideration, encapsulated for the authors in the timeless struggle to balance the good health of the many with the good health of a few. Dr. Golem is a timely analysis of the limitations of medicine that never loses sight of its strengths.

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Dr. Golem: How to Think about Medicine

Modern science with its seemingly high degree of fragmentation and its apparently endless capacity to generate new specialist fields of knowledge is a salient area in which to investigate the issue of disciplinary culture. In this essay I will look at what the modern sociology of scientific knowledge has to contribute towards our understanding of this topic. I will review some rather general work on science as a form of culture before turning to the specific issue of how disciplinary boundaries and

Trevor Pinch

Papers

Inside knowledge: second order measures of skill

Opening Black Boxes: Science, Technology and Society:

'Should One Applaud?': Breaches and Boundaries in the Reception of New Technology in Music

Dr. Golem: How to Think about Medicine

The Culture of Scientists and Disciplinary Rhetoric