文章基本信息

标题：Culturomics 2.0: Forecasting large-scale human behavior using global news media tone in time and space
本地全文：下载
作者：Kalev Leetaru
期刊名称：First Monday
电子版ISSN：1396-0466
出版年度：2011
卷号：16
期号：9
DOI：10.5210/fm.v16i9.3663
语种：English
出版社：University of Illinois at Chicago Library
摘要：News is increasingly being produced and consumed online, supplanting print and broadcast to represent nearly half of the news monitored across the world today by Western intelligence agencies. Recent literature has suggested that computational analysis of large text archives can yield novel insights to the functioning of society, including predicting future economic events. Applying tone and geographic analysis to a 30–year worldwide news archive, global news tone is found to have forecasted the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, including the removal of Egyptian President Mubarak, predicted the stability of Saudi Arabia (at least through May 2011), estimated Osama Bin Laden’s likely hiding place as a 200–kilometer radius in Northern Pakistan that includes Abbotabad, and offered a new look at the world’s cultural affiliations. Along the way, common assertions about the news, such as “news is becoming more negative” and “American news portrays a U.S.–centric view of the world” are found to have merit.