Analysing Public Science Debates through Blogs and Online News Sources

Mike ThelwallStatistical Cybermetrics Research GroupUniversity of Wolverhampton, UK

Contents

Background Blogs Oline news sources RSS

Tracking public science debatesDetecting public science debates

Background

Blogs, public opinion, online news, RSS

Background

There are millions of bloggersBloggers are almost normal human beingsAutomatically tracking bloggers’ postings may give insights into public opinion

Blog tracking companies

IBM WebFountain

Intelliseek BlogPulse “Monitor, measure and leverage

consumer-generated 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 click-search graphs Stem cell research GM food Mobile phone radiation

Research graphs

Time-consuming to collect dataGive 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 wordTrend detection used to identify hot “science fear” topicsData cleaning to remove spamNeed manual scanning of list of words experiencing biggest usage increase

Science concern hot topics (7%)

0 20 40 60 80

Fear of Science

Information

Progress

Threat Prediction

Other

Duplicate

Temporal Descriptor

Random

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 MediaAlso 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.