News and Blog
speak the same language

Introduction

With this map we wanted to understand how the Internet talk about Net Neutrality. At the beginning we tried to look at the theme from different points of view. We search it on the web by using technical words, but we found out that we didn’t need to define this controversy through different terms, because it already had one: Net Neutrality.

This visualization is based on five queries: “Net Neutrality”, “Open Internet” “Stand for”, “Open Internet” “Against”, “Two speed Internet”, “Pay to play Internet” and shows how the terms change with different search keys.

How to read the visualization

The infographic shows the terms of this debate, it is possible to compare them at two different levels: likening the top 20 most interesting terms of the five queries and verifying if, and how, the way of speaking changes between News and Blog.

It is possible to isolate one word, with a simple mouse over, and see if and what position they have in the others search keys. The colour displays the inclination of each n-gram: red for ethical terms and blue for technical terms. The length of the line below each word shows their frequence.

How it has been done

Once we have chosen the five queries, produced with the idea that we wanted to obtain data as uniform as possible, we searched them on Google and collected the first 100 results. We then divided them into seven different categories: “News”, “Blog”, “Activism”, “Petition”, “Politics”, “ISPs”, “CP”. As we can see on the barchart most of the data are related to the categories News and Blog and for this reason we decided to compare firstly this two. We used Zup to obtain .txt files from websites and than we analyzed them with Sven.

Findings

At a first glance we can see that aren’t big differences between News and Blog terms, indeed a clearly blue pattern emerge from the visualization. The only difference that we can notice is that in some cases blog’s n-grams are more specific than the others (for instance Title II).

If on one hand we can notice that some words are always used and from both of the categories: ISPs, FCC, Service, Barack Obama. On the other hand it is interesting to see how some term’s position changes depending on the queries: Money appears only in “Two speed Internet” which is a little bit more technical than the others, vice versa with a more “sentimental” search key we can find terms like Freedom, Future, Stand or Interest.

Metadata

Timestamp: 6/12/2014 - 7/12/2014

Data source: Google Search

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