This post was originally published on this site.
Researchers at Stony Brook University have argued that social media biographies are a great way to study self-identity.
They analyzed self-authored biographies of more than 51 million English-language Twitter users over a period of six years and their paper, “The Evolution of Occupational Identity in Twitter Biographies,” was accepted by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2024.
PhD students Xingzhi Guo and Dakota Handzlik, and Distinguished Teaching Professor Steven Skiena, Department of Computer Science, collaborated with Jason J. Jones from Stony Brook’s Department of Sociology to work on this project.
The team found 435 million biography changes between February 2015 to July 2021, many of which reflected users revising their job titles. To these observations, the researchers added data regarding the prevalence and prestige of each job.
The dataset they constructed is now the largest resource for studying the dynamics of occupational identity.
Skiena said, “Work is an essential part of our daily lives. It significantly contributes to our sense of identity and how we behave around others.” For example, a business owner will have a different personality than a school teacher, and a nurse will usually be more patient than a race-car driver.
Their work holds potential for numerous applications — from helping organizations use social approval mechanisms to their benefit (such as enhancing job prestige, increasing social recognition and celebrating their employees effectively), to eliminating the need to scrape private resumes from social networks, and mitigating ethical and privacy concerns.
Read the full story by Ankita Nagpal on the AI Innovation Institute website.