Public opinions of drones:A study of drones’ usage and portrayal

Similar to many great inventions of the modern world, drone (aka. Unmanned aerial vehicle), was born from the militaristic intentions of men. The first appearance of a drone was in 1839, during the invasion of Venice by Austrian soldiers. The Austrian soldiers attached explosives to unmanned balloons that were sent to the enemies.

In today’s commercialized environment, drones are no longer exclusively used for the military. Their growing presence in civilian life as generated a global commercial drone market valued at 5.80 billion USD in 2018.Outside of the domains of the commercial domain. Drones are also for transport, agriculture, surveillance, conservations…etc. Along with the growing usages of drone, the rising concerns soon follows. The following research direction demonstrated how society reacts to this new technology. What the public and media find important and how they are portrayed.

Research Questions

What are the most discussed topics revolving the privacy concerns of drones on Google.com and Baidu.com?

Through our initial research for the project, one of the common themes we noticed is the number of concerns involving the drone’s impact on personal privacy. Whether if it’s a US man, shooting down a neighbour’s drone, or TSA threatening to shoot down drones at nearby airports. To have a holistic understanding, we wanted to investigate drone and privacy-related topics focused by both the western and eastern demographics. We used the major search engines from each demographic, then generated categorized topics that allowed us to understand the differences and similarities. The webpages are first categorized by the type of website it is (e.g. news, blog, academic paper). This brings context to the content. Then we looked at the content displayed on the website and generated keywords from the content.

Which type of drone-related incidents have more coverage by the media/news?

When talking about related drone incidents, many people immediately think about being spied on. However, there’s a whole spectrum of accidents/incidents related to drones more than the privacy domain. The purpose of this visualization helps to organize the different types of drone-related incidents there are, and to find out what type of drone-related incidents has more news media coverage. The word “incidents” used in this case refers to drone-related, accidents, which include but not exclusively to injuries, damages to people or things. The incidents are organized by location and time. The size of the circle represents the amount of coverage.

Does drone-related regulations correlates with the number of reported drone-related incidents in the news?

With the creation of each new technology, government lawmakers are adaptive enough to observe social disturbances, and keep our current regulations updated. In this case, with the mass production of drones as home recreational use for the average citizen, many different types of unforeseen problems become visible. What inspired this visualization is the UK’s declaration of drone registration regulation in hopes of keeping the sky safe from irresponsible drone owners. Through this visualization, we are hoping to see if there is a correlation between the safety measures taken by the government and the number of incidents. If there is a decrease in incidents after a regulation been introduced. We identified the most covered type of incident happens at the airport in the previous visualization. In this visualization, we focused on regulations and incidents revolving around the airport.

Which genre of movies mentioned drones the most?

What inspired this topic is the growing curiosity of how the creatives incorporated this new technology in their film/movie projects. There is an undeniable growth in the number of movies with drones incorporated in their plot. Whether as the main subject matter, supporting element, or as a part of the settings within the storyline. What drives us to look into which genre of movies mentioned drones the most, is the curiosity of how creatives viewed drones. What it’s capability, what type of scenario it is in.

What words from movie scripts has the strongest association with Drones through?

The goal for this visualization is to filter the words within 5 divided time periods, and observe which words stays constant through time. This helps us to understand which word has the strongest association with drones, through context changes through time. What’s interesting about this research question is the process of studying the relationship of natural language used around drone.