Introduction
This section is dedicated to the changes that sharing economy vocabulary has undergone through years. We explored not only the most frequent words used, but also the increasing and decreasing words, comparing different periods.
Before and after the super actors
Are the super actors modifying the sharing economy’s vocabulary?
Protocol
In order to get a significant result, we had to develop a complex protocol. It consists of the following steps. Plain texts’ subdivision per year and per field (Google Scholar, LexisNexis, Google Search) as in protocol [2.1]. R script development to achieve the average frequency of any word per article in each field; with the same script we made plots to compare each year to the past years’ period in different fields, on one hand; on the other hand plots focusing on each relevant words, comparing different fields in the same plot. The words displayed are not the total corpus of words, but only those manually selected from it because of their relevance.
How to read it
Finally, we translated the protocol in a visualization spitted in two parts. The first part shows three graphs per year (one graph per field). This kind of graph is divided into three main parts: a section, corresponding to the square’s bisector, representing the space of average words’ usage; a section below containing those words whose recurrence frequency decreases within the year selecteted, in relation to the past; a part above with the increasing once.
Under these graphs, we have a series of new graphs dedicated to specific words. Here circles (LexisNexis), triangles (Google Search) and squares (Google Scholar) represent the word’s trending position in one year.
Findings
The visualization offers many insights about words (and topics) used year by year talking about sharing economy. The most important one comes out watching at graphs on the top, before and after 2009. The main visible difference is that, if before that date always the same words were used, after 2009, we can see that topics change a lot and fast: this means that, probably, the foundation and the growth of Uber and Airbnb (the two absolute main actors) could have had a disruptive impact on sharing economy vocabulary. Moreover, you can gain lots of insights by watching at the evolution of words’s trends in the graphs below. For instance, check the path taken by the word “bike”.
