TY - GEN
T1 - Massive media event data analysis to assess world-wide political conflict and instability
AU - Gao, Jianbo
AU - Leetaru, Kalev H.
AU - Hu, Jing
AU - Cioffi-Revilla, Claudio
AU - Schrodt, Philip
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Mining massive daily news media data to infer patterns of cultural trends, including political conflicts and instabilities, is an important goal of computational social science and the new interdisciplinary field called "culturnomics." While the sheer size of media data makes this task challenging, a greater hurdle is the nonstationarity of data, manifested in several ways, which invalidates surge in media coverage as a reliable indicator of political change. We demonstrate the use of advanced statistical, information-theoretic, and random fractal methods to analyze CAMEO-encoded political events data. In particular, we show that on the country level, event distributions obey a Zipf-Mandelbrot law, and interactions among countries follow an exponential law, indicating that local or prioritized events dominate the political environment of a country. Most importantly, we find that world-wide political instabilities, such as the Arab Spring, are associated with breakdown or enhancement of long-range correlations in political events.
AB - Mining massive daily news media data to infer patterns of cultural trends, including political conflicts and instabilities, is an important goal of computational social science and the new interdisciplinary field called "culturnomics." While the sheer size of media data makes this task challenging, a greater hurdle is the nonstationarity of data, manifested in several ways, which invalidates surge in media coverage as a reliable indicator of political change. We demonstrate the use of advanced statistical, information-theoretic, and random fractal methods to analyze CAMEO-encoded political events data. In particular, we show that on the country level, event distributions obey a Zipf-Mandelbrot law, and interactions among countries follow an exponential law, indicating that local or prioritized events dominate the political environment of a country. Most importantly, we find that world-wide political instabilities, such as the Arab Spring, are associated with breakdown or enhancement of long-range correlations in political events.
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-37210-0_31
DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-37210-0_31
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84874796838
SN - 9783642372094
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 284
EP - 292
BT - Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction - 6th International Conference, SBP 2013, Proceedings
T2 - 6th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction, SBP 2013
Y2 - 2 April 2013 through 5 April 2013
ER -