Description

The visualization shows the comparison between the places quoted in the news sites and in the official magazines carried out by the IS: Dabiq and Rumiyah. It appears that the European media sites mentioned more often the places where the attacks claimed by ISIS occurred. For the cities of Paris, Nice and Brussels there is indeed a very great disproportion with the number of times in which these cities are mentioned in the Islamic state’s magazines and in the news articles. An imbalance of this kind occurs in contrast with “Islamic state”, much quoted in the magazine and only a few times by the media. In Dabiq and Rumiyah instead there are more recurrences related to the neighboring places of the Middle East area.

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 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. Among the recurring topics were also selected the places most often mentioned. These places were then collected and organized in a single sheet, unifying all periods in a single dataset.

Similarly, for the texts of Dabiq and Rumiyah, downloaded from the website of The Clarion Project, Voyant tool was used to find recurrences. The recurrences of places were collected into a dataset organized by word and number or recurrence. For the visualization were selected the top 20 most cited places in the news and top 20 from the IS magazines, to compare them.

Data

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

Data source: Google, Web Scraper, Voyant tool

Download data

The collected data were organized into 7 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 "place" sheet shows for each place the number of occurrences in the articles of the 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. There is a sheet called "place" for the places recurrences.

6_totalnews
The file contains the sheet "place total" with the total counts of occurrences of the periods.

7_comparison dabiq
The file contains the "place" sheet; a list of places mentioned in the IS magazines, in the totality of its editions and the number of occurrences for each place.