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The degree of separation or integration of domains across borders has an impact on the balance between work and life. Previous studies have shown individuals who perceive balance between work and life domains tend to be more satisfied with their lives, reporting higher physical and mental health. At times of crisis, such as during a pandemic, borders can be disrupted, affecting work-life balance and leading to a short- or long-term negative impact on well-being. Border theory provides a systematic lens through which to study these changes. However, changes cannot be studied using interviews or diaries as these are not at the scale required when societal disruptions occur. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using a computational linguistic approach to operationalize border theory at scale, using readily available social media data. In particular, we make two main contributions. First, we design metrics to measure key characteristics of borders. This involves the application of a transformer-based topic modeling technique, BERTopic, to detect topics from social media data. Second, we apply this operationalization to a case study of around a million tweets posted by nearly two hundred teachers and journalists in the UK from the beginning of 2019 to the end of 2022. In so doing, we longitudinally study and compare the changes in borders between work and life before, during, and after COVID-19 lockdown periods.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3640998","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2024,4,29]],"date-time":"2024-04-29T10:05:31Z","timestamp":1714385131000},"page":"1-23","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":19,"title":["A Computational Linguistic Approach to Study Border Theory at Scale"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"8","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0000-4580-1862","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Timothy","family":"Douglas","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Dept. of Computer Science, University College London, London, United Kingdom"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1425-3837","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Licia","family":"Capra","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Dept. of Computer Science, University College London, London, United Kingdom"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9712-4090","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Mirco","family":"Musolesi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Dept. of Computer Science, University College London &amp; Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna, London, United Kingdom"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2024,4,26]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","volume-title":"Work-life border control model: A re-think of border theory. 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