Description

In this visualization the main element under analysis is the text of the articles related to the Islamic state found on European online media, to understand how the European media describe this organization. What emerges is that in the periods related to the terrorist attacks, the words most frequently used are linked to violent imagery and identity of the terrorists. There is a big difference between the words used in the interval periods between the attacks. The difference is found both in the point of view used in the articles for narration and also in the specific words used, selected by number of occurrences. The big difference in quantity is justified by the fact that the number of articles for the periods of the attacks is much bigger than for interval periods. This could also signal that information is produced by European media mainly after attacks carried out by ISIS. Hence events might play a key role in creating the brand image of the Islamic state that we are investigating in the context of this research.

Protocol

Through the use of the Alexa ranking, four European news sites were selected to be used for the collection of data relating to the articles concerning ISIS. Two of the four news sites (Euronews and BBC Online) were selected as first two European news sites in the ranking of the most used, the other two (The Telegraph and Mirror Online) from the ranking of the UK. This method of selection considered news sites that use the English language for their publications, but we discovered that this wasn’t the case after all (read below).

The data collection was first conducted on Google to collect the articles. Each search query used the word "ISIS," combined with the name of a city (Paris, Brussels and Nice) in the periods in which terrorist attacks in Europe have occurred.

The 7 periods examined were selected referring to the results of Google Trends as shown in the introduction of this website. Respectively to the peaks represented by the attacks were selected 3 interim periods, defined truce time intervals. For each event or research period it was defined a time range of two weeks for the collection of the articles. The same search query matched to the reference period was repeated four times, once for each news site; for a total of 28 searches.

Example: ISIS AND Paris site: euronews.com - Costum range: Nov 6, 2015 - Nov 20, 2015

The results of each research were collected with the Google Chrome extension Web Scraper that allows to collect specific items of the page through the html code reading. In this case, URLs, articles section, title and text were collected. The result was a .csv file for each search, containing the results of the scraping. The total number of articles collected (1758) was then manually reduced according to the relevance for this research; the final number of used articles is 1215. Most of the articles were written in foreign languages, for this reason the articles were translated into English using Google Translate.

All the generated datasets were combined into different files for analysis. The text of the articles was analyzed to bring out the occurrences, with Voyant tool. With the use of the tool, the three most frequent words were selected for each article. In a second iteration of the process, for each one of the 7 time periods, the 15 most frequent words were selected and finally compared.

Data

Timestamp: 06/12/2016 - 13/12/2016

Data source: Google, Web Scraper, Voyant tool

Download data

The collected data was organized into 6 different datasets.

1_charliehebdo - 2_bataclan - 3_brussels - 4_nice
For each of the four periods of the terrorist attacks there is a dataset containing all the downloaded articles with Web Scraper (link, title, text, category) and the added elements during analysis (translated text, keywords, names, type, length and notes). The first sheet contains the just mentioned elements while the other summarizes the counts of these elements. The "keywords" sheet shows for each item the number of times they appear in the articles of that period.

5_neutralperiods
For truce defined periods there is a single file that contains a sheet for each period with the elements collected using Web Scraper. In other 3 sheets called "word 1", "word 2" and "word 3” the words are stored for each period and number of times of appearance.

6_totalnews
In the "words" sheet, the list of the 15 words most used on the total of the analyzed period is contained.