Evolution of Water Narratives in Local US Newspapers: A Case Study of Utah and Georgia

Technical Report · Wed Aug 01 04:00:00 EDT 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1467781· OSTI ID:1467781

Gunda, Thushara ^[1]; Sweitzer, Matthew D. ^[2]; Comer, Kevin T. ^[3]; Finn, Conor ^[4]; Murillo-Sandoval, Sandra ^[5]; Huff, Jennifer ^[6]

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1. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
2. The Ohio State Univ., Columbus, OH (United States)
3. MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA (United States)
4. Univ. of Sydney, NSW (Australia); Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Marsfield, NSW (Australia)
5. National Polytechnic Inst. (IPN), Mexico City (Mexico)
6. Burke Museum, Seattle, WA (United States)

Narratives about water resources have evolved, transitioning from a sole focus on physical and biological dimensions to incorporate social dynamics Recently, the importance of understanding the visibility of water resources through media coverage has gained attention. This study leverages recent advancements in natural language processing (NLP) methods to characterize and understand patterns in water narratives, specifically in 4 local newspapers in Utah and Georgia. Analysis of the corpus identified coherent topics on a variety of water resources issues, including weather and pollution. Closer inspection of the topics revealed temporal and spatial variations in coverage, with a topic on hurricanes exhibiting cyclical patterns whereas a topic on tribal issues showed coverage predominantly in the western newspapers. We also analyzed the dataset for sentiments, identifying similar categories of words on trust and fear emerging in the narratives across newspaper sources. An analysis of novelty, transience, and resonance using Kullback-Leibler Divergence techniques revealed that topics with high novelty generally contained high transience and marginally high resonance over time. Although additional analysis needs to be conducted, the methods explored in this analysis demonstrate the potential of NLP methods to characterize water narratives in media coverage.

• Research Organization: Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
• DOE Contract Number: AC04-94AL85000; NA0003525
• OSTI ID: 1467781
• Report Number(s): SAND--2018-9197; 667383
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
58 GEOSCIENCES