• Stream of Media Issues : Monitoring of World Food Security

UN Global Pulse White paper

Chavalarias, David, Cointet J-P., & Cornilleau L., Duong T-K, Mogoutov A., Villard  L., Roth C., Savy T. (2011). Streams of Media Issues – Monitoring World Food Security. UN GLobal Pulse, Presented at United Nations, Oct.

This project is based on the automatic analysis of news related to food security issues in French language media (national and local).

Text-mining network analysis tools are used to identify the key themes discussed in the press at a given period. Each article is then associated with these automatically reconstructed topics whether they correspond to concerns expressed at the local level, or general statements and action at national/international level.

These news items are also geo-located both by the origin of the story and the places mentioned in the story enabling to map how a given theme or issue is distributed over the world.

Moreover, themes identified at successive time steps are reconnected into streams of content. A stream visualization illustrates how topics articulate through time.

An online interface allows to visualize these maps, themes and news entries and to answer questions such as : Is an issue – concerning for example the impact of climatic change on food security – attracting more attention with time? How this specific issue relates with contiguous subjects (use of biofuel for example) ? Does the climatic change issue observed at a given time stem from, possibly various, past issue framing or is it a completely emergent topic ?