research question

What events are the drivers of the debate?








Description

The fatal Tesla car crash that happened on the 7th of May wasn't revealed until the end of June and had an enormous resonance across all medias. The ethical questions that arose, the responsability issues and the realization by the public opinion that self-driving cars could be soon in our everyday life re-shaped the way the topic was treated, with more frequency and focus on the safety concerns and aspects of the topic. As we clearly see from the representation, Tesla's deadly car crash has been the spark to lighten up the debate on both CNN and the New York Times, while the Guardian, with his own tag “self-driving cars”, seems to have better focused the topic since the technology became initially popular.

Protocol

We wanted to understand how the actors were located inside the context and also how they were going to be involved in the shaping of the debate. By overlapping all the articles from the single newspapers analized in the third question we were able to identify the areas where an event likely happened through the higher density areas on the frequency chart. We then went into the newspaper websites and searched for the most echoed news during the analyzed period to identify our driver events.

Data

Timestamp: 01/12/2016 - 05/12/2016

Data source:NYTimes, The Guardian, CNN

The dataset used for the realization of the visualization is the one developed in the last research question: How are they depicted by news media?