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 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 search es  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 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

Hot science fear words

80

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.