Description
The alluvial plot enable to show what are the most relevant press outlets active on the topic and what kind of issues are delivered, according to the last ten month:
these have been ordered by relevance, according to the total amount of news delivered monthly. The information is given by the flux of news content through the timeframe considered.
The data collected for each query show some significant variation. Comparing the two different queries, it can be noticed that different issues are faced, while talking about the more futuristic perspective of space colonization. The plans for a Mars colonization are the most related issues. It’s interesting to notice that a business oriented press outlet such as Business Insider is leading on the topic, usually featured in science and technology press: indeed it’s Phys.org, a physics and aerospace focused webzine, that stands out as the main news provider.
Skepticism about the opportunity of colonizing other planets, is another issue that emerge, due to both ethical and scientific reasons.
By contrast, observing the results for the space exploration query leads to different remarks: data visualization show how science and technology press clean the news providing out.
Considering the topic, it’s easy to observe how news about spaceflight and technological successful achievements are the most relevant. There it follows deep space exploration issues, involving exoplanets search, asteroids landing as well as satellites and rovers missions. This second cluster is pretty important due to its link to all those news reporting CURRENTLY ON GOING OPERATIONS.
Topic categories are more fragmented in the second visualization, concerning space exploration. This is due to the coexistence of multiple news reporting public perception of space exploration future,
as well as giving space to criticism on Trump administration of NASA fundings and National Space Program.
Eventually, it’s interesting to notice how some issues, such as the militarization of space environment and the effects of space permanence on human body, are mutually shared. Indeed, these topics constantly appear in both charts, whether we talk about the more futuristic perspective of space colonization or the current space exploration activities reported in space exploration news.
The bump chart displays the topic categories, ordered by relevance on its Y Axis, while showing the ten month timeframe on its X Axis. This visualization has been created to better display how issues are provided over time and when each category has more space in the news media.
Protocol
To deliver this protocol, we adressed the Google News feed in incognito mode. The research has been focused on United States, displaying the results in English.
The timeframe selected includes all the results available from 1/1/2018 to 1/11/2018, sorted by relevance. The total amount for collected news included more than 350 results, which have been filtered to exclude those not pertinent. The Octoparse Webscraper tool has been used to easily collect the title and text content for each news. The results have been opened and scraped with the TextRazor tool, in order to extract the refered topics from each text content. A manual scraping has been made to extract the exact name of the news providers and clusterize many different issues in categories.
All the results have been organized by columns in an Excel folder, in order to match titles, topics, providers and publication dates.