Submarine Channel

Unspeak Data Visualization: Part 1

Natural Disasters. Climate Change. Clean Coal. Bio fuels. Organic Food. Oil Spill. No doubt, we are in the science and environment-related Unspeak episode. As Steven Poole so poignantly points out, public debates are won or lost as soon as the language to describe these words is chosen.

There are so many Unspeak terms when it comes to discussing the environment, so it’s no surprise that when we look over at the Network visualization — which shows how related terms are to one another on Wikipedia articles — we clearly see how strongly linked these topics are.

Once you clicking on a label of another one of the Unspeak terms, the related words reorient around it.

So what kind of observations can we make once we dive into the data? And if we’re not on top of news on an everyday basis, what can we infur? Not a problem. This week, a quick glance through the Frequency, Context, and Newsmap visualizations brings us right up to speed on important issues happening in the world.

Natural Disaster, one of the most obvious ‘Unspeak’ words, makes the whole disaster part sound benign and and ascribes blame to Nature. We seem to forget that human decisions, however, are at play, often making things even worse after the ‘disaster’ event. Looking at the context visualizations in which Natural Disaster is used – especially most recently in the aftermath of the destruction in the Philippines – we notice how the key issues in the conversation revolves around how much natural disasters cost society – in terms of displacement, loss of homes, country preparations for disasters and foreign aid.

The use of Natural Disaster in tweets peaked on May 15, with a total of 4675 Tweets mentioning the term. There were also many newspaper headlines on that day, pointing out just how many people are displaced each year, how (un)prepared nations are, and the EU’s new emergency response center.

Another closely related term is Climate Change, which has its ups and downs continuously throughout the year, particularly right before and after disasters strike. The last peak in tweets on the frequency visualization is recorded on June 25th.

Clicking over to the Newsmap visualization, its confirmed that Obama gave his big climate change speech that day, pledging to bypass congress to tackle climate change.

A quick breakdown shows that in any given 15 minute period at which tweets are displayed, four times as many males are involved in the debate than female.

Looking at the context visualization the key words tweeted along with Climate Change are “grandchildren” (referencing to save the planet for our grandchildren”. Tackle climate, urging change, and combat climate are also high on the list, with the youth category, 21 and over, consistently echoing the need to save the planet.

Another term we noticed appearing frequently in the Context visualization was Permafrost.

Again a quick glance over to newsmap and we learn how climate change is responsible for the looming melting of the arctic permafrost that will result in a rising waterlevels.

And finally, Greenpeace, the unspeak term for the campaigning group. Taking a look at the frequency visualization, the bars suddenly begin to rise in October, with peak number of tweets hitting on Oct 24. Tensions are rising, but what is it related to?

Looking at the context visualization, there is a mix of tweets in Russian and English, all referencing ‘hooliganism’, activists, arctic, piracy, that suddenly began to rise in the last month, with peak tweets hitting on Oct 24, 2013 with 14,911.

We can deduce something went seriously wrong with a mission in the Russian arctic, and a glance over at Newsmap confirms that. On this day Russia decided to reduce piracy charges against 30 Greenpeace activists to hooliganism, after the activists planned to scale Russia’s first oil shore rig in the arctic.

This article is part of a series of articles that explore the results that Unspeak’s data visualization tools provide. You can find the rest of this series here: Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. The data visualization tools, which scour social media and the web for Unspeak terms, are just one part of the Unspeak interactive documentary experience which also includes six video episodes and an ever-growing Unspeak dictionary you can contribute to yourself.