PulseWeb project explored whether is possible to track and comprehend thematic shifts in media attention through the automatic analysis of news articles. To do so, we analyzed how the Francophone media reported on food security issues over the past 8 years. This project was conducted for the Global Pulse initiative made by the UN. It is supported by researchers from ISC-PIF and IFRIS.

Methodology

More than 20,000 related articles published between 2004 and 2011 were selected using an ontology of food security related terms. The contents of these articles were analyzed and organized into thematic clusters, which can be traced back to specific news articles or aggregated in a big picture representation. Semantic clustering methodologies and networks theory were used to automatically produce those clusters. The news items were also geo-located, enabling us to map how a given theme or issue is distributed over the world. Moreover, themes identified at successive time steps were reconnected into streams of content. A stream visualization illustrates how topics are articulated through time.

To learn more about the project methodology and the main results : download the with paper.