Digital Narratives of Grief and Resilience: Insights from the Integrating Emotional Stories Online ( IESO) Platform

Social media has altered how humans express emotions, among them, grief. Features unique to social media platforms, such as persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability have afforded social media users new spaces and larger communities in which to express deep, complex pain and find support. This interdisciplinary study, leveraging insights from social work, computer science, and linguistics, explores how grief and daily stressors are expressed, on a digital platform, among Black Harlem residents and students attending a large university in New York City. Particular attention is given to posts with features that reflect African American English and social media-specific language, seeking to understand challenges associated with interpreting these expressions; misinterpretation can lead to differential support and treatment for those seeking help. To examine the experience, we created the Integrating Emotional Stories Online (IESO) platform, to collect expressions of grief and everyday stress. The platform allowed participants to anonymously post and self-label their emotions; we analyzed posts using qualitative and computational topic modeling methods to identify core themes. We identified four primary themes: expressions of interpersonal grief, systemic grief, everyday stressors and self-care & joy. The computational topic modeling approach validated those themes. The study was conducted in the context of significant events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, protests against police brutality, and mass shootings. Findings reveal the complex ways grief and everyday stress may be communicated in digital space, emphasizing the importance of deep analysis and reflection when examining hyper-local dialects. Findings also underscore the importance of digital platforms in understanding and supporting individuals who experience grief and other forms of stress, providing valuable insights for mental health practitioners.