Tag Archives: locations

Tracking and comparing regional coverage of coal seam gas

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In the last post, I started looking at how the level of coverage of specific regions changed over time — an intersection of the Where and When dimensions of the public discourse on coal seam gas. In this post I’ll continue along this line of analysis while also incorporating something from the Who dimension. Specifically, I’ll compare how news and community groups cover specific regions over time.

Regional coverage by news organisations

One of the graphs in my last post compared the ratio of coverage of locations in Queensland to that of locations in New South Wales. Figure 1 below takes this a step further, breaking down the data by region as well. What this graph shows is the level of attention given to each region by the news sources in my database (filtered to ensure complete coverage for the period — see the last post) over time. In this case, I have calculated the “level of attention” for a given region by counting the number of times a location within that region appears in the news coverage, and then aggregating these counts within a moving 90-day window. Stacking the tallies to fill a fixed height, as I have done in Figure 1, reveals the relative importance of each region, regardless of how much news is generated overall (to see how the overall volume of coverage changes over time, see the previous post). The geographic boundaries that I am using are (with a few minor changes) the SA4 level boundaries defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. You can see these boundaries by poking around on this page of the ABS website.

The regions in Figure 1 are shaded so that you can see the division at the state level. The darker band of blue across the lower half of the graph corresponds with regions in Queensland. The large lighter band above that corresponds with regions in New South Wales. Above that, you can see smaller bands representing Victoria and Western Australia. (The remaining states are there too, but they have received so little coverage that I haven’t bothered to label them.) I have added labels for as many regions as I can without cluttering up the chart.

Figure 1. Coverage of geographic regions in news stories about coal seam gas, measured by the number of times locations from each region are mentioned in news stories within a moving 90-day window. The blue shadings group the regions by state. Hovering over the image shows a colour scheme suited to identifying individual regions. You can see larger versions of these images by clicking here and here.

Continue reading Tracking and comparing regional coverage of coal seam gas →

It’s time

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The last two posts have updated my progress in understanding the Where and the Who of public discourse on coal seam gas, but didn’t say much about the When. Analysing the temporal dynamics of public discourse — in other words, how things change — has been one of my driving interests all along in this project, so to complete this series of stock-taking articles, I will now review where I’m up to in analysing the temporal dimension.

At least, I had hoped to complete the stock-taking process with this post. But in the course of putting this post together, I made some somewhat embarrassing discoveries about the temporal composition of my data — discoveries that have significant implications for all of my analyses. This post is dedicated mostly to dealing with this new development. I’ll present the remainder of what I planned to talk about in a second installment.

The experience I describe here contains important lessons for anyone planning to analyse data obtained from news aggregation services as Factiva.

The moving window of time

The first thing to mention — and this is untainted by the embarrassment that I will discuss shortly — is that I’ve changed the way I’m making temporal graphs. Whereas previously I was simply aggregating data into monthly or quarterly chunks, I am now using KNIME’s ‘Moving Aggregation’ node to calculate moving averages over a specified window of time. This way, I can tailor the level of aggregation to the density of the data and the purpose of the graph. And regardless of the size of the time window, the time increments by which the graph is plotted can be as short as a week or a day, so the curve is smoother than a simple monthly or quarterly plot.

One reason why this feature is so useful is that the volume of news coverage on coal seam gas over time is very peaky, as shown in Figure 1 (and even the 30-day window hides a considerable degree of peakiness). Smoothing out the peaks to see long-term trends is all well and good, but it’s important never to lose touch with the fact that the data doesn’t really look that way.

Figure 1. The number of articles in my corpus over time, aggregated to a 30-day moving window. Hovering over the image shows the same data aggregated to a 90-day window. Continue reading It’s time →

Where are we now?

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It’s been a busy few months. Among other things, I presented at the Advances in Visual Methods for Linguistics 2016 conference held here in Brisbane last week; I submitted a paper to the Social Informatics (SocInfo) 2016 conference being held in Seattle in November; and I delivered a guest lecture to a sociology class at UQ. Somewhere along the way, I also passed my mid-candidature review milestone.

Partly because of these events, and partly in spite of them, I’ve also made good progress in the analysis of my data. In fact, I’m more or less ready to draw a line under this phase of experimental exploration and move onto the next phase of fashioning some or all of the results into a thesis.

With that in mind, I hope to do two things with this post. Firstly, I want to share some of my outputs from the last few months; and secondly, I want to take stock of these and other outputs in preparation for the phase that lies ahead. I won’t try to cram everything into this post. Rather, I’ll focus on just a few recent developments here and aim to talk about the rest in a follow-up post. Specifically, this post covers three things: the augmentation of my dataset, the introduction of heatmaps to my geovisualisations, and the association of locations with thematic content. Continue reading Where are we now? →

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 →