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5 février 2020 Maison de la Création et de l'Innovation.Stuart Soroka (http://www.snsoroka.com/) est professeur de science politique et communication à l'université du Michigan et membre du Michigan Institute for Data Science. Dans le cadre d'un financement accordé par le Data Institute de l'université Grenoble Alpes et destiné à encourager les échanges avec d'autres centres internationaux en sciences des données, il est intervenu du 3 au 7 février 2020 auprès de la communauté UGA et notamment des étudiants des master MDLE (Métiers de l’information et de la communication) et SIRS (Sociologie de l’innovation et recompositions sociales). Les recherches de S. Soroka portent sur la communication politique, l’origine des préférences politiques du public et les relations entre les politiques publiques, l'opinion publique et les médias de masse. Il a mis au point un outil appelé le Lexicoder pour permettre l’analyse automatisée de contenus de même qu’un dictionnaire des sentiments facilitant la reconnaissance automatique de sentiments dans des textes journalistiques. Il a en parallèle développé une méthodologie permettant dans R la collecte et l'analyse de données volumineuses et hétérogènes. Il partage par ailleurs lorsque cela est possible des jeux de données utilisés dans son travail sur les élections canadiennes et américaines. ( http://www.snsoroka.com/data/) [Géraldine Castel]The role of emotions in politics ...Stuart Saroka seems to have created a new methodology to analyse people’s mind sets and feelings about the messages they receive on a daily basis. He does this by carefully observing political structure and how politicians organise their slogans, images, and advertising in a way that can reach as many people as possible, on an emotional level. This can be very dangerous, as I understand it, because in the wrong hands it could be used negatively to manipulate public opinion. Mr Saroka has a very interesting way of thinking and analysing yet he should be careful that this method is not misused by those who see in it an opportunity to exploit and manipulate. [Marion]Stuart Soroka told us about the emotional reception of political messages. He pointed out the fact that people are more attentive to negative messages than positive ones. His findings make us realise that politicians use a negative register to catch people’s attention. It is an effective way to manipulate the masses. [Esilia]I remember that Stuart talked about political communication which was the main topic of the presentation. Unfortunately I didn’t really understand anything, first, because I’m not used to his accent, but mostly because I didn’t like the way he speaks or moves. It’s too dramatic, like a performance in the movies or a comedy. Sorry for him. [Hugo]The sentiments, the tone, the emotions in news content or in political campaigns can manipulate or have a huge influence on the decisions of the audience. Politics is about language. Understanding how it works can help us to understand public opinion and the political behaviour in our democracies. The images, the words, the tone, and the context change the message of the speech. Even the colours, even the clothes could change the message. [Carolina]During this conference we learnt about the research topics that Mr Soroka is currently working on, mainly regarding the impact of emotional information during the 2016 American presidential campaign. He also talked about the way words can have a negative or positive emotional charge for people, by using a recent photo of Elizabeth Warren’s campaign bus which displayed her political mantra “Hope vs Fear” which is extremely polarising because it summons two very opposing emotions. He then went on to explain his work on the topic and the way he analyses how people are influenced by the way politicians express themselves, how their communication can regulate information processing and drive people’s preferences in terms of policy. He ended by talking about the large text corpuses he analyses and how he extracts words that tell a whole story in themselves. He showed us wordclouds referring to exactly what remained in people’s minds from the Trump/Clinton campaigns in 2016. He showed us how, even if Clinton was the best candidate, her momentum was broken by the email ‘scandal’ which was what people mostly talked about at the time, whereas Trump had such a string of scandals behind him that people were unable to focus on one specifically. With hindsight, this greatly benefited him in the end. [Stéphane]&#160;