Analysing Public Science Debates through Blogs and Online News Sources Mike Thelwall Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group University of Wolverhampton, UK
Contents Background Blogs Oline news sources RSS Tracking public science debates Detecting public science debates
Background Blogs, public opinion, online news, RSS
Background There are millions of bloggers Bloggers are almost normal human beings Automatically tracking bloggers postings may give insights into public opinion
Blog tracking companies IBM WebFountain Intelliseek BlogPulse Monitor, measure and leverage consumergenerated media Others growing
RSS Format Rich Site Syndication/Really Simple Syndication XML technology Used for frequently updated information sources (blogs, news, academic journals) RSS Readers Users subscribe to the RSS feeds of favourite blogs/sites/journals/searches Notified when updates available User-controlled push technology
Tracking Public Science Debates
Blog keyword searches Technorati Searches weblogs by keyword and for links Stem cell research Blogdigger stem cell research IceRocket Allows Advanced searches Allows genuine date range search (Google only allows last updated date range searches)
Track evolution over time What is changing about interest in Stem cell research/gm food? Are experts good at identifying changes in public interest? How can experts be sure/can they be supported with quantitative information? Can blogs be used to generate time series reflecting changes in public interest?
Free science debate graphs Solves the trend identification problem? Blogpulse Offers free automatic blog searches and keyword-generated clicksearch graphs Stem cell research GM food Mobile phone radiation
Research graphs Time-consuming to collect data Give control over the data source
Detecting Public Science Debates
How to detect a new debate? Heuristic methods E.g. Read papers, scan relevant blogs Automatic methods E.g. look for sudden increase in usage of science-related words in blogs?
Free hot topic searches Blog keyword search (sort by date) Technorati Searches weblogs by keyword and for links Stem cell research Blogdigger blog search Hot topic searches Blogdex top contagious information Bloglines today s hot topics (most popular links) Searches find the really big science debates?
Specialist research tools Commercial software Intelliseek/IBM Mozdeh RSS monitor Generates sub-collections Generates word time series Allows keyword searches Identifies hot topics
Mozdeh Science Concern Corpus A collection of blog postings containing a fear word AND a science word Trend detection used to identify hot science fear topics Data cleaning to remove spam Need manual scanning of list of words experiencing biggest usage increase
Science concern hot topics (7%) Random Temporal Descriptor Duplicate Other Threat Prediction Progress Information Fear of Science 0 20 40 60 80 Hot science fear words
Unexpected results? Social science research Sudden burst of discussion over fears of the economic theories of Karl Rove, an influential advisor to George Bush Computer security Concern over spyware features in a software vendor s products Research showing that consumers pin numbers could be revealed by poor printing
Conclusions Many free tools support exploration of Consumer Generated Media Also room for specialist research tools
References http://www.blogpulse.com/ http://www.blogpulse.com/www2006- workshop/ http://www.creen.org/ Thelwall, M., Prabowo, R. & Fairclough, R. (2006, to appear). Are raw RSS feeds suitable for broad issue scanning? A science concern case study. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.