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Leveraging spatial dimensions of news media content analysis to explore place-based differences in natural resource issues

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Abstract

News media serve as a repository of location data, whether embedded in datelines or news feature content. This study explores how to leverage these data to visualize the regional distribution of risk and benefit news themes associated with reporting on marine aquaculture, a growing domestic industry with complex social and ecological impacts. We extracted geographic content (place names) from news articles about aquaculture risk and/or benefit using natural language processing, geocoded articles by their focal location, and qualitatively validated theme-location associations for geospatial analysis. We present emergent results from this analysis and provide recommendations for applying or integrating this methodology in interdisciplinary team science.

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Notes

  1. “Mapping the Globe” (http://www.kanarinka.com/mappingtheglobe/), a project from the Center for Civic Media at MIT, tracks news attention from the Boston Globe by geographic reference and articles per capita.

  2. “NewsStand” (http://newsstand.umiacs.umd.edu/web/), a project from the University of Maryland, provides a searchable news reading interface, which maps stories by topic. “Lydia TextMap” (http://www.textmap.com/), a project from Stony Brook University, tracks the frequency and sentiment of person, place, and object references in news.

  3. All marine aquaculture production of Atlantic salmon in the USA is conducted by Cooke Aquaculture, a large New Brunswick-based company, which produces between 18 and 35 million pounds of the fish per year (Whittle 2018).

  4. Environmental and human health benefit themes were collapsed into one variable to account for previous analyses (Rickard and Feldpausch-Parker 2016), which suggest they are not common in aquaculture news.

  5. Researchers have also developed automated NLP packages to determine geographic focus. For example, Teitler et al. (2008) used a weighted combination of a term’s distance from the beginning of a news article and its frequency of mentions within that article.

  6. For the purposes of the SEANET project, county-level data was sufficient for data integration as the overall project focus was at the scale of a bay or region. A different research context may require more geographic specificity.

  7. Originally, the second author was the sole coder of focal locations. A post hoc reliability test was assessed with two additional coders to confirm the geocoding per a request by the reviewers.

  8. The data visualizations produced in our study will be shared with SEANET stakeholders to provide further geographic context for our results; this added context may directly inform their own place-based work.

  9. The Maine Times closed in 2002.

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Funding

This research was supported by National Science Foundation award no. 1355457 to Maine EPSCoR at the University of Maine.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication & Journalism, University of Maine, Dunn Hall, Orono, ME, 04469, USA

    Kevin P. Duffy & Laura N. Rickard

  2. Environmental Studies Program, Bowdoin College, Roux Center, Brunswick, ME, 04011, USA

    Hugh C. Cipparone & Eileen S. Johnson

  3. School of Computing and Information Science, University of Maine, Boardman Hall, Orono, ME, 04469, USA

    Kate Beard

  4. Department of Digital and Computational Studies, Bowdoin College, Visual Arts Center, Brunswick, ME, 04011, USA

    Fernando Nascimento

Authors
  1. Kevin P. Duffy
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  2. Hugh C. Cipparone
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  3. Eileen S. Johnson
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  4. Laura N. Rickard
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  5. Kate Beard
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  6. Fernando Nascimento
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Correspondence to Kevin P. Duffy.

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Duffy, K.P., Cipparone, H.C., Johnson, E.S. et al. Leveraging spatial dimensions of news media content analysis to explore place-based differences in natural resource issues. J Environ Stud Sci 10, 303–309 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-020-00595-9

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