conclusion
Conclusion
Despite not having a unique solution we do have more interesting information and elements about this phenomena that can help us and other future researchers to gain a deeper understanding of the relationships among humans when we talk about sports in general.
Data science is nowadays more and more trendy even in sports, but for the majority it’s all used for marketing studies to better boost the “economic” and enterpreneurial side of these companies and all that gravitates around them.
Regardless it being an important and interesting part of sports development, we chose to also take into account the “human” and sociological side and try to study it with newer methods, such as linguistic and social network analysis. We also tried our approach on a fairly new live video streaming service, Twitch, to see if we could capture some new aspects compared to older websites and services.
The way we exchange and share our experiences has definitely changed from the past, and now mostly happens in these new platforms, new online gathering places. Most of our experiences, ideas, thoughts are now shared online and that’s why these “digital pubs” are important to study.
Through linguistic, sentiment and emotion analysis we were able to have an insight look at how these communities behave at a “content level”, with joy and anger being the prevalent elicited emotions in twitch users when talking about football: both emotions are strongly associated with passion, one of the foundation of playing, watching and enjoying football!
Analyses of the underlying network structure of these communities helped us in realizing that yes, football does create communities, but they’re not always only positive ones: our study of the social balance and assortativity showed that, even though some channels present level of homophily, there are also examples of its opposite, heterophily! People have the tendency to collect into groups, but they can be similar or dissimilar ones, displaying different behaviours depending on their surroundings.
In short, when it comes to football the idea of community is embedded in the definition of the sport itself: it’s all teamwork. You can win, you can lose, but the team remains. Whereas the result can affect our moods, it’s the long-term run and the relationships that keeps us cheering and rooting, the passion that is passed on from grandparents to nephews, from parents to children and unites us all overcoming any linguistic or geographical barrier.
Despite rooting for different football teams, despite difficulties and hard times, we teamed up and enjoyed learning new things together for this project. We hope you liked it too and let us know if you want to share your takeaways with us. We are eager to expand our research!
Fernanditos gifts:
Are you really working on the project?
Fernanditos thank you so much for reading our story, we hope you enjoy it as much as we have.
WE LEAVE YOU A LITTLE SOMETHING FROM US IN THE BUTTON BELOW 😏