Wikileaks is known to release unique - often sensitive - information to the public. The internet platform hosts not only the Afghan War Diary which dominated news headlines this July, but also features documents such as the 2008 Annual Returns of Scientology UK, planning documents for the tragic 2010 Love Parade in Duisburg, or the recently leaked "CIA Red Cell Memorandum on United States "exporting terrorism"".
Besides leaked documents, wikileaks also provides public access to data sets, such as when during a 24 hour period starting 3AM Wednesday 25th, 2009, the web page released half a million US national text pager intercepts; all of which stemmed from the
"24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington".
These 500.000+ pager intercepts document, in a unique fashion, the immediate impressions that many people in the US communicated in response to the unfolding events of 9/11. In this massive data set each of the individual pages works, if you wish, as an individual stone in a fine grained mosaic of America's collective reaction to an event that has markedly shaped our recent history, at the time it was happening.
In an attempt to make sense of the 6.4 million words that comprise the more than 573.000 paged lines in the wikileaks 9/11 pager intercept data, researchers Mitja Back, Albrecht Kuefner, and Boris Egloff from the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, have now conducted a statistical analysis of the emotional content of these pages.
As a first step of this analysis, they
"computed the percentage of words related to (a) sadness (e.g., crying, grief), (b) anxiety (e.g., worried, fearful), and (c) anger (e.g., hate, annoyed) "
and then analyzed changes in the frequency of these words over the course of events such as
"[...] the initial plane crashes; the collapse of both towers at the World Trade Center, or WTC; the first announcements by President Bush and Mayor Giuliani; and President Bush's address to the nation) [...]"
All of these events, the researchers found
"[...] had a strong and differentiated impact on the actual expression of negative emotions"
The results are presented nicely in the graph that I posted here (as it was to large to be posted here efficiently):
"Interestingly, the attacks did not appear to immediately result in sadness, nor did single events influence the usage of sadness words"
Anxiety related words on the other hand showed marked responses to specific events in the 9/11 time line. They spiked just after the actual plane crashes, or after the official confirmation that the crashes were due to terrorist hijackings.
While sadness remained relatively constant, and anxiety saw systematic spikes with subsequent recovery to base-levels, anger seemed to increase constantly throughout the observed time period:
"Anger was present as soon as the first airplane crashed into the WTC, and it continued."
As events unfolded, and more information was becoming available, expressions of anger steadily and strongly increased.
"[Only] President Bush's speeches (at 1:04 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.), which can be interpreted as a vicarious acting out of people's anger, led [...] to a temporary pause in the increase of anger.
In contrast to anxiety, anger never returned to its baseline level."
Until at the end of the day it
"was almost 10 times as high as at the start of September 11."
So now, close to 9 years after the 9/11 attacks, as we are still engaged in heated debate of what constitutes a dignified use of the former WTC site, I wonder how instructive it may be to reflect on the emotional path each of us experienced in 2001. How many of our "ground-zero-opinions" are still tainted by anger?
Main References:
Back, M. ; Kuefner, A. ; Egloff, B. (2010). The emotional timeline of september 11, 2001 Psychological Science : 10.1177/0956797610382124
http://911.wikileaks.org/
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