Semantic systems and visual tools to analyze climate change communication

Abstract

Given the intense attention that environmental topics such as climate change attract in news and social media coverage, key questions are how different stakeholders perceive observable threats and policy options, how public media react to new scientific insights, and how journalists present climate science knowledge to the public. This presentation will demonstrate the Web intelligence platform [1] to address these questions, including knowledge extraction and visualization techniques to explore the lexical and geospatial context of online coverage. The examples stem from the Media Watch on Climate Change [2], the Climate Resilience Toolkit [3] and the NOAA Media Watch the three applications that aggregate environmental resources from a wide range of online sources. These systems not only show the value of providing comprehensive information to the public, but also have helped to develop novel communication success metrics beyond bipolar assessments of sentiment.