Description

NASA and SpaceX are the actors most cited in the debate. Are there any differences between those kind of « superactors »? In this phase we chose to directly compare them in order to understand the characteristics of those two main voices. NASA is the historical governmental space agency of the USA, composed by different specialized teams that keep the aim of discovering, exploring and researching environmental and space facts. SpaceX is a private company founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, pioneer of the dream to walk on Mars like a fun trip, he is becoming a big actor in the world of spacecraft.

Data show the differences and similarities about the topics debated. First of all, we wanted to highlight categories organizing data on a double axis system; through Y, the position of the category is fixed by its total amount of words. Through X, is shown for which actor the categories more discussed; it’s like a double pole. When a category is located in the middle it means that both actors talk about the topic equally, conversely it means that one of them prevails on the other. For example, “space travel” is the nearest category to SpaceX’s pole.

On the right side we have inserted some further details to show the proportion of the singular category over the total; the specific percentage per issue and a direct comparison of the top 5 words per actors by categories.

Protocol


We have searched a way to obtain two descriptions of the two main actors; NASA and SpaceX. We wanted it similar in structure and from a trustworthy source. We excluded the official website of each because the information could be written with a commercial aim (as it’s often the case for private company). Therefore, we preferred to analyze pages from Wikipedia. The main reason is the fact that singular terms were shared from a big community of writers that controls, modifies and updates the page monthly. So we extracted the list of the different words in each English page tanks to Keyword Density Analyzer. After a manual scraping in order to exclude irrelevant terms like general verbs and adjectives, we organized those words by typologies. In that way we could compared the common words to understand directly parallelism and differences. Finally, we analyzed uncommon terms and in general the categories to understand on which issue NASA and SpaceX gave more importance.

Data

Timestamp: 01/12/2016 - 20/12/2016

Data source: Wikipedia

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This dataset contains the exact terms used to describe what SpaceX and NASA does, the typology of the terms and finally the count and the percentage of use.