Abstract
AbstractWe live in a global village where electronic communication has eliminated the geographical barriers of information exchange. The road is now open to worldwide convergence of information interests, shared values and understanding. Nevertheless, interests still vary between countries around the world. This raises important questions about what today’s world map of information interests actually looks like and what factors cause the barriers of information exchange between countries. To quantitatively construct a world map of information interests, we devise a scalable statistical model that identifies countries with similar information interests and measures the countries’ bilateral similarities. From the similarities we connect countries in a global network and find that countries can be mapped into 18 clusters with similar information interests. Through regression we find that language and religion best explain the strength of the bilateral ties and formation of clusters. Our findings provide a quantitative basis for further studies to better understand the complex interplay between shared interests and conflict on a global scale. The methodology can also be extended to track changes over time and capture important trends in global information exchange.
Highlights
We live in a global village where electronic communication has eliminated the geographical barriers of information exchange
We use data mining and statistical analysis to device a measure of bilateral information interests, and use this measure to construct a world map of information interests
The free online encyclopedia consists of almost 300 language editions, with English being the largest one
Summary
We live in a global village where electronic communication has eliminated the geographical barriers of information exchange. Globalisation of information has been discussed extensively in the research literature (Friedman, 2000; Fischer, 2003; Nye, 2004), currently there is no method to quantitatively map bilateral information interests from large-scale data. Without such a method, it becomes difficult to justify qualitative statements about, for example, the complex interplay between shared values and conflict on a global scale. The free online encyclopedia consists of almost 300 language editions, with English being the largest one This multi-lingual encyclopedia captures a wide spectrum of information in millions of articles. We quantify the effects of these factors using regression analysis and find that information exchange is constrained by the impact of social and economic factors connected to shared interests
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