Description
What are we actually discussing about? Driverless cars? Autonomous vehicles? How do this terminology vary in aìdifferent areas and contexts? What are the differencies in meaning between them?
By comparing the different graphs it's possible to note a few things. The first one is how robocar dominates Youtube and has a strong presence on the Web and Images but is almost not existing on the News. On the other side self-driving car seem to be legit across all of the four channels, while the other terms are much less used and have high degree of variance over time and channels. So we further investigated by trying to figure out what “robocar” were really about on the channel where they were discussed the most: Youtube. We faced a colourful transformers-style cartoon for children which has been particularly popular. It was an interesting example of how popular culture, imagery and media could have an influence on the public. We tried to further investigate this aspect in the influence & bias section.
Protocol
New subjects usually don't have a clear terminology and easily recognizable boundaries to their issues and structure. It's highly dependent from time, context and conditions in which the topic develops and sticks to our imagery and every-day life through the medias. We wanted to clarify which terminology is most commonly used to talk about the subject.
We researched for the five terms which popped up more from our last research: self-driving car, driverless car, autonomous car, autonomous vehicle and robocar. By using Google Trends we tracked down people searches over time across the different channels: Youtube, Google News, Google Images and Google Web. We then proceeded to create an interactive visualization where is possible to compare and confront the different trends.
Data
Timestamp: 01/12/2016 - 05/12/2016
Data source: Google Trends
Download data (4MB)
The dataset created is an xls. file containing the five terms divided into columns self-driving car, driverless car, autonomous car, autonomous vehicle and robocar and in the lines we have the amount of time they were being searched each month with a maximal value of 100 and the other values calculated in relation to it.