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.
Monitoring 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–based news, standing testament to the Web’s disruptive power as a distribution medium. Pooling together the global tone of all news mentions of a country over time appears to accurately forecast its near–term stability, including predicting the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, conflict in Serbia, and the stability of Saudi Arabia. Location plays a critical role in news reporting, and “passively crowdsourcing” the media to find the locations most closely associated with Bin Laden prior to his capture finds a 200km.–wide swath of northern Pakistan as his most likely hiding place, an area which contains Abbottabad, the city he was ultimately captured in. Finally, the geographic clustering of the news, the way in which it frames localities together, offers new insights into how the world views itself and the “natural civilizations” of the news media.
While heavily biased and far from complete, the news media captures the only cross–national real–time 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–time 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.
"Culturomics 2.0: Forecasting large-scale human behavior using global news media tone in time and space" by Kalev Leetaru
First Monday
Volume 16, Number 9
5 September 2011
Kalev Leetaru
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