Cursing is not uncommon during conversations in the physical world: 0.5% to 0.7% of all the words we speak are curse words, given that 1% of all the words are first-person plural pronouns (e.g., we, us, our). On social media, people can instantly chat with friends without face-to-face interaction, usually in a more public fashion and broadly disseminated through highly connected social network. Will these distinctive features of social media lead to a change in people's cursing behavior? In this paper, we examine the characteristics of cursing activity on a popular social media platform - Twitter, involving the analysis of about 51 million tweets and about 14 million users. In particular, we explore a set of questions that have been recognized as crucial for understanding cursing in offline communications by prior studies, including the ubiquity, utility, and contextual dependencies of cursing.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/tk_prasad/41/
Presented at the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Baltimore, MD, February 15-19, 2014.
Cursing in English on Twitter project page can be accessed at http://wiki.knoesis.org/index.php/Cursing_in_English_on_Twitter.
Slides that accompanied the proceeding can be accessed at http://www.slideshare.net/knoesis/cursing-in-english-on-twitter-at-cscw-2014.