Description
In this visualization we studied the most frequent terms related to the controversy that appear in online articles and blogs. We started with the queries emerged from previous Seealsology protocol as the prominent topics across the years in the Seealsology visualizations. The queries are: Libre Knowledge, Freedom of Information, Free Content, Crypto Anarchism, Hacktivism, Open content, Open source, Free Culture Movement, Access to Knowledge, Open access, Sci-hub, Libgen. We portrayed the evolution of top ten words year by year, starting from 2013 to 2016. Then we organized the terms in four semantic areas: Academic (identified by the colour dark green), Open (identified by the colour bright green), Piracy (identified by the colour black) and Publishing (identified by the colour blue). Finally we crossed checked these results with Google Trends to see if there is any overlap between the two. We used the frequency of words rather than their count to ensure statistical validity.
The overall trends are fluctuating sharply one year to another. It’s possible to spot Lawrence Lessig as one of the most debated topics in 2015 and Sci-Hub and its founder Alexandra Elbakyan in 2016. Lessig occupies the third position in 2015, the same as Sci-Hub in 2016. In the same year Elbakyan occupies the ninth position. The most discussed topics overall are about the “Publishers” and “Academic” semantic areas.
