First Monday,\u00a0Volume 16, Number 9 – 5 September 2011<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Abstract<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nNews 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<\/strong> (emphasis DSC)<\/em>.<\/em><\/strong><\/span> Applying tone and geographic analysis to a 30\u2013year 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\u2019s likely hiding place as a 200\u2013kilometer radius in Northern Pakistan that includes Abbotabad, and offered a new look at the world\u2019s cultural affiliations. Along the way, common assertions about the news, such as \u201cnews is becoming more negative\u201d and \u201cAmerican news portrays a U.S.\u2013centric view of the world\u201d are found to have merit <\/strong>(emphasis DSC).<\/em><\/span><\/p>\nCouple items from the Conclusions<\/em> section<\/strong><\/p>\nMonitoring first broadcast then print media over the last 70 years, nearly half of the annual output of Western intelligence global news monitoring is now derived from Internet\u2013based news,<\/span> standing testament to the Web\u2019s disruptive power as a distribution medium <\/strong>(emphasis DSC).<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n…<\/p>\n
While heavily biased and far from complete, the news media captures the only cross\u2013national real\u2013time record of human society available to researchers. The findings of this study suggest that Culturomics, which has thus far focused on the digested history of books, can yield intriguing new understandings of human society when applied to the real\u2013time data of news. From forecasting impending conflict to offering insights on the locations of wanted fugitives, applying data mining approaches to the vast historical archive of the news media offers promise of new approaches to measuring and understanding human society on a global scale.<\/p>\n
I originally saw this piece at the <\/em>Futurist Update, from October 2011<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" First Monday,\u00a0Volume 16, Number 9 – 5 September 2011 Abstract 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,95,25,480],"tags":[587,96,581,792],"class_list":["post-23942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-future","category-global-globalization","category-journalism","category-society","tag-future","tag-global","tag-journalism","tag-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23942"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23950,"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23942\/revisions\/23950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}