How the news moves

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Don’t feel like reading? Fine, skip to the pictures!

My last post explored the spatial and temporal dynamics of news production, looking at how the intensity of news coverage about coal seam gas varied over time across regional newspapers. In this post, I will look instead at the geographic content of news coverage: which places do news articles about coal seam gas discuss, and how has the geographic focus changed over time?

Coal seam gas development in Australia has become a matter of national interest, at least insofar as it has a place (albeit a shrinking one) on the federal political agenda, and has featured (albeit to varying degrees) in news coverage and public debate across the country. But it’s hard to talk sensibly about coal seam gas — whether you are talking about the industry itself, its social and environmental impacts, or how the community has responded to it —  without grounding the discussion in specific locations. From one gas field to another, the structures and dynamics of underground systems vary just as much as the social systems on the surface. I am convinced that any meaningful analysis of CSG-related matters must be highly sensitive to geographic context. (My very first PhD-related post on this blog, an analysis of hyperlinks on CSG-related web pages, pointed to the same conclusion.)

Most news stories about coal seam gas are ultimately about some place or another (or several), whether it be the field where the gas is produced, the power plant where it is used, the port from which it is exported, the environment or community affected, or the place where people gather to protest or blockade. Keeping track of which places are mentioned in the news could provide one way of tracking how the public discourse about coal seam gas develops. And the most logical way to present and explore this kind of information is with a map. In theory, every place mentioned in an article could be translated to a dot on a map. Mapping all of the dots from all of the articles should reveal the geographical extent and focus of news about coal seam gas.

Why do this? (Other than because I can, and it might be fun?) Firstly, because I’m still a little sketchy about how coal seam gas development and its attendant controversies have moved around the country over the last decade or two. I’m reasonably familiar with what has transpired in Queensland, but much less so with the situation in New South Wales. As for the other states, where there has been much less industry activity, I know virtually nothing about where and when coal seam gas has been discussed. So a map (especially one that can show time as well) of CSG-related news would provide a handy reference for understanding both the national and local geographic dimensions of the issue.

The other reason to map the news in this manner is that it may provide a way to both generate and answer interesting questions about the news landscape (or the public discourse more broadly) around coal seam gas — and this is, after all, what my PhD needs to do. Continue reading How the news moves →

Mapping the news

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Where did the last 12 months go? All I can really remember is something about being confirmed as a PhD candidate. I read a lot, and wrote a lot, but did very little of what I originally set out to do — namely, visualising and analysing text data. Now, finally, I am back in the sandpit. I’ve amassed a truckload of data in the form of news articles and blogs about coal seam gas development in Australia, and I intend to spend the next short while sifting through it and seeing what sort of sandcastles I can build before the tide of my next PhD milestone forces me to construct something more substantial.

The ultimate aim of my PhD is to explore how computational text analysis techniques such as topic modelling can assist in the analysis of public discourse. But for now, my objective is to get acquainted with my data. This data is divided into two piles, each representing a part of the discursive landscape around coal seam gas (or CSG) in Australia (if you’re American, think coalbed methane). One pile of data consists of texts published on the web by a range of actors (the sociology kind, not the Hollywood kind) including community groups, activists, lobbyists and politicians. I’ve siphoned these texts from a variety of websites using a data-crawling tool called import.io. The second, much larger, pile of data consists of news articles from hundreds of Australian mainstream media publications, from the national broadsheet right down to the local rags. I gathered these articles from the online news database Factiva, with the help of a script, available at the website for the conversation analysis tool Discursis, which converts Factiva’s HTML outputs into tabular format in the form of CSV files.

This post is devoted to exploring the second pile of data — the many thousands of news articles that I gathered from Factiva. Without attempting any fancy text analysis, I aim to get a first look at the overall volume, scope and diversity of the content. The focus in this post is on the overall volume and the geographic distribution of the content. In a future post, I plan to explore the the specific news sources in more detail. Continue reading Mapping the news →

Adventures in harmonic space

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Long, long ago, I studied music. In fact, when I finished high school, music was all I wanted to study. To be sure, I didn’t just want to study it: I wanted to compose it as well. 1 But I soon discovered that music theory was something worthy of study in itself, quite apart from the grounding it provided for composition. Music theory, especially the analysis of harmonies and harmonic progressions, provided a way to pop the hood on a piece of music (or even a whole genre) and learn what makes it tick. As if that weren’t exciting enough, I sensed that there were more profound truths waiting to be teased out of these harmonic structures. For if they offered clues about what makes music tick, then surely they said something about what makes us tick as well.

I never did pursue my vision of a grand unified theory of tonal harmony and psychoacoustics. I soon found that there were also other things worth studying, many of which came with the bonus incentive of career prospects. One thing led to another, and for better or worse, I ended up working for the government. And not as a music theorist. But to this day, I can’t help hearing a piece of music and thinking about what makes it tick. The theorist within me is always plugging away, even while the rest of me is just enjoying the tune.

Unsurprisingly then, when I started playing with network graphs about 18 months ago, among the first things I asked myself is what application they might have for music theory. The beauty of network graphs is that they can be used to represent just about anything. Any system or community of inter-related parts can be turned into a network of nodes and connections. So far on this blog I’ve used network graphs to explore the linkages among websites related to coal seam gas, and to identify clusters of documents containing duplicated text. On my other blog, I used network graphs to see how the names of different people and places featured across a collection of my posts.

In this post, I will use network graphs to visualise the relationships among chords within a piece of music. You could examine melodies in much the same way, by breaking them down to their individual notes and tracking which notes pair up and cluster together most often. But I suspect that there is more to be gained from visualising the harmonic relationships. Continue reading Adventures in harmonic space →

Notes:

  1. Eventually, years later, I did get around to writing some music. And I have finally published some of the results onto Youtube. ↩

Mapping concepts, comparing texts

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In the previous post, I explored the use of function words — that is, words without semantic content, like it and the — as a way of fingerprinting documents and identifying sets that are composed largely of the same text. I was inspired to do this when I realised that the dataset that I was exploring — a collection of nearly 900 public submissions to an inquiry by the New South Wales parliament into coal seam gas — contained several sets of documents that were nearly identical. The function-word fingerprinting technique that I used was far from perfect, but it did assist in the process of fishing out these recycled submissions.

That exercise was really a diversion from the objective of analysing the semantic content of these submissions — or in other words, what they are actually talking about. Of course, at a broad level, what the submissions are talking about is obvious, since they are all responses to an inquiry into the environmental, health, economic and social impacts of coal seam gas activities. But each submission (or at least each unique one) is bound to address the terms of reference differently, focussing on particular topics and making different arguments for or against coal seam gas development. Without reading and making notes about every individual submission, I wanted to know the scope of topics that the submissions discuss. And further to that, I wanted to see how the coverage of topics varied across the submissions.

Why did I want to do this? I’ll admit that my primary motivation was not to learn about the submissions themselves, but to try my hand at some analytical techniques. Ultimately, I want to use computational methods like text analytics to answer real questions about the social world. But first I need some practice at actually doing some text analytics, and some exposure to the mechanics of how it works. That, more than anything else, was the purpose of the exercise documented below. Continue reading Mapping concepts, comparing texts →