The words we use to describe ourselves and each other reveal a lot about what we value. In this project, we mine various corpora to investigate the prevalence and interconnections among these values. For instance, in one line of research, we explore the patterns of virtues and values attributed to people in their obituaries. In another, we explore the praise given to soldiers and other fighters killed in combat. In yet another, we examine the themes of different news outlets. We have also used this approach to analyze the conceptual themes and patterns in Nietzsche’s philosophy. In ongoing work, we are using LIWC2015 and custom dictionaries to investigate far-right and misogynist groups in Australia and internationally.

Publications:

• Alfano, M. (2019). Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology. Cambridge University Press.

• Alfano, M., Carter, J. A., & Cheong, M. (2018). Technological seduction and self-radicalization. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 4(3): 298-322.

• Alfano, M., Higgins, A., & Levernier, J. (2018). Identifying virtues and values through obituary data-mining. Journal of Value Inquiry, 52(1): 59-79.

• Alfano, M., Sullivan, E., & Fard, A. (forthcoming). Ethical pitfalls for natural language processing in psychology. In M. Dehghani & R. Boyd (eds.), The Atlas of Language Analysis in Psychology. Guilford Press.

• Alfano, M. & Higgins, A. (2019). Natural language processing and network visualization for philosophers. In E. Fischer & M. Curtis (eds.), Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy. Bloomsbury.

• Alfano, M. (2019). Nietzsche’s affective perspectivism as a philosophical methodology. In P. Loeb & M. Meyer (eds.), Nietzsche’s Metaphilosophy. Cambridge University Press.

• Alfano, M. (2018). Digital humanities for history of philosophy: A case study on Nietzsche. In L. Levenberg, T. Neilson, & D. Rheams (eds.), Handbook of Methods in the Digital Humanities. Palgrave.

• Alfano, M. (2018). The epistemic function of contempt and laughter in Nietzsche. In M. Mason (ed.), The Moral Psychology of Contempt. Rowman & Littlefield.

• Christen, M., Alfano, M., & Lapsley, D. (2013). Ethical issues of ‘morality mining’: When the moral identity of individuals becomes a focus of data-mining. In H. Rahman & I. Ramos (eds.), Ethical Data Mining Applications for Socio-Economic Development. 1-21. IGI Global.

 Tutorials:

• Developing corpus analysis as an interdisciplinary tool in cognitive science: R Studio pipeline

• Examining moral emotions in Nietzsche with the ‘Semantic Web Exploration Tool: Nietzsche’
  

Visualizations: