%0 Journal Article
%T Empathy Rituals: Small Conversations about Emotional Distress on Twitter
%A Frances Shaw
%A Julie Brownlie
%J Sociology
%@ 1469-8684
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0038038518767075
%X There is growing research interest in the sharing of emotions through social media. Usually centred on ¡®newsworthy¡¯ events and collective ¡®flows¡¯ of emotion, this work is often computationally driven. This article presents an interaction-led analysis of small data from Twitter to illustrate how this kind of intensive focus can ¡®thicken¡¯ claims about emotions, and particularly empathy. Drawing on Goffman¡¯s work on ritual, we introduce and then apply the idea of ¡®empathy rituals¡¯ to exchanges about emotional distress on Twitter, a platform primarily researched using big data approaches. While the potential of Goffman¡¯s work has been explored in some depth in relation to digital performances, its emotional dimension has been less fully examined. Through a focus on Twitter conversations, we show how reading small data can inform computational social science claims about emotions and add to sociological understanding of emotion in (digital) publics
%K Emotions
%K Goffman
%K rituals
%K Twitter
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0038038518767075