SCENARIOS OF USE

- For Journalists: When you have to write an article on a new controversy subject that you never approached before, and you need fast information about who's covering it and which are the main sub-issues at a given moment.

- For Decision Makers: when you have to get very fast, rough, and as complete as possible information about a new and urgent policy issue, because you have been requested to a meeting but you don't know precisely what are the sub-issues at stake, and their relevance in the current public debate.

One first kind of information that you would need to know when approaching controversy mapping refers to news coverage, that is to "how hot" is your controversy on the global news at a given moment. In order to investigate in a very fast way the "temperature" of your controversy - and get some very rough information about the sub-issues and topics - you have two main options: you can either choose to use the Newsmap tool , or to investigate the coverage of your controversy in a set of selected news websites and/or blogs through the Lippmanian Device .

Both the tools allow visualization of data based on the investigation of the news coverage of a given issue. The Newsmap, visually displaying the most relevant articles, can help in identifying in a quick way the main debated sub-issues of a given controversy.

METHODS, TOOLS, AND EXAMPLES

1. Use the "NEWSMAP" tool

A first way to get a very fast visualization of a given controversy is to search the "newsmap" tool, an application that researches live the Google News database and outputs the results in the form of a "news dashboard", with cklickable results.

From the Newsmap project website a more detailed description of how the tool actually works:

"Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

Newsmap's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media.

Google News automatically groups news stories with similar content and places them based on algorithmic results into clusters. smap, the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster that the Google News Aggregator presents. In that way users can quickly identify which news stories have been given the most coverage, viewing the map by region, topic or time. Through that process it still accentuates the importance of a given article.

Newsmap also allows to compare the news landscape among several countries, making it possible to differentiate which countries give more coverage to, for example, more national news than international or sports rather than business

Currently, the Internet presents a highly disorganized collage of information. Many of us are working in an information-soaked world. There is too much of everything. We are subject everywhere to a sensory overload of images, bombarded with information; in magazines and advertisements, on TV, radio, in the cityscape. The internet is a wonderful communication tool, but day after day we find ourselves constantly dealing with information overload. Today, the internet presents a new challenge, the wide and unregulated distribution of information requires new visual paradigms to organize, simplify and analyze large amounts of data. New user interface challenges are arising to deal with all that overwhelming quantity of information".

METHOD: to serach the newsmap simply enter a keyword for your controversy in the search box, on the top part of the screen (for example: "swine flu")

Options include the possibility of comparing results among the selected countries (by selecting them on the top of the screen) and by news sections (available at the bottom of the page), therefore comparison by country gives you an immediate idea of "where" in the world your controversy is debated at a given moment, and which are the main matters of concerns reported in the news titles.

In the image below the search results for "swine flu" are reported (date: 15th August, 2009 - all countries and all sections selected). The Output image shows how India was the Country where the controversy is hotter, followed by United States and Austria.

• Newsmap output for "Swine Flu" search (date: 15th August, 2009):
  

2. USE THE LIPPMANIAN DEVICE AND A LIST OF GLOBAL NEWSPAPERS

A second way to investigate the "hotness" of your controversy is through the use of the Lippmannian Device. This method is a little bit slower than the previous one, but it will allow you to get information about which particular source of information is mostly covering your issue at a given moment.

You can find a detailed description of the Lippmannian device here; Anyhow, what you need to know is that the Lippmannian device (aka Googlescraper) is a piece of equipment for mapping and interpreting controversies. Specifically, the device queries the resonance of a particular term, or a series of terms, in a set of Websites that you input, and makes the results - in the form of host clouds - available for further interpretation.

As an example, we will choose the "Swine flu" issue and investigate the hotness of this controversy thorough the use of the Lippmannian Deivce:

First step:

search for the list of the Top U.S. and U.K. Global Newspaper Websites. Here's a list of the most visited news websites in the U.S. and in the U.K. derived from www.allyoucanread.com:

U.S.
New York Times http://global.nytimes.com/
Dallas Morning News http://www.dallasnews.com/
Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/
St. Louis Post-Dispatch http://www.stltoday.com/
Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/
San Diego Union-Tribune http://www.signonsandiego.com/
Orlando Sentinel http://www.orlandosentinel.com/
New York Post http://www.nypost.com/
Miami Herald http://www.miamiherald.com/

U.K.
Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Daily Mail http://www.dailymail.co.uk
Mirror http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk
Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk
Daily Star http://www.megastar.co.uk/
Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/
Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
News of the world http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/
Evening Standard http://www.thisislondon.co.uk

Following Steps:

> Launch the Lippmannian device by clicking here

> Set Maximum number of result to 1000

> Copy and paste the above text in the top box of the Lippmanian Device

> Enter the keyword "swine flu" with quotation marks in the bottom box

> Press Scrape Google and wait for results (it usually takes from 3 to 10 minutes to the machine to produce the output, depending on the number of hosts investigated and on the "hotness" of your controversy)

> Once you get the results in the form of host cloud, all the links to the quotations are made available by the Lippmannian Device, so you are able to get to the sources of information.

> Order the host cloud thorugh the checkbox in the left menu, to get a coarse view of your controversy and identify the top sources reporting about it.

> The following tag cloud is displayed:

• Host cloud for "swine flu" in the global news (15th August, 2009):
  

RESULTS AND COMPARISON:

This cloud demonstrates how swine flu can be considered to be a "very hot" controversy, with almost all the top U.S. and U.K. newspapers giving to the issue a lot of attention in a quite homogenous way, close to 1000 results per host.

A comparison with another issue, namely the Nanoparticles one, may help in providing elements to assess the relevance (and therefore the hotness) of one ore more controversies. The below host cloud was obtained with the same methodology previously discussed, but with the "nanoparticles" keyword put in the bottom box of the Lippmanian device. As you may notice, this controversy seems to be less hot, with leading global newspapers (like the nytimes and the washingtonpost) giving to it a fairly good attention, while other sources of information demonstrate to be less interested in covering it.

• Host cloud for "nanoparticles" in the global news (15th August 2009)
  

Suggested Exercise

Use the Newsmap tool and the Lippmannian device to assess the hotness of the "climate change" controversy. Try to identify the most relevant subissues and the coverage accross different states with the aid of the Newsmap titles, either by interpreting the dashboard or by clicking on the most relevant news boxes. Try to assess "how hot" is the climate change contrversy by comparing the results obtained with the Lippmanian Device for "swine flu" and for "nanoparticles". This work shouldn't take you more than 30 minutes.

BACK TO "EXPLORE MY OWN CONTROVERSY" MAIN PAGE

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