Abstract
Because the volume of information available online is growing at breakneck speed, keeping up with meaning and information communicated by the media and netizens is a new challenge both for scholars and for companies who must address public relations crises. Most current theories and tools are directed at identifying one website or one piece of online news and do not attempt to develop a rapid understanding of all websites and all news covering one topic. This paper represents an effort to integrate statistics, word segmentation, complex networks and visualization to analyze headlines’ keywords and words relationships in online Chinese news using two samples: the 2011 Bohai Bay oil spill and the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. We gathered all the news headlines concerning the two trending events in the search results from Baidu, the most popular Chinese search engine. We used Simple Chinese Word Segmentation to segment all the headlines into words and then took words as nodes and considered adjacent relations as edges to construct word networks both using the whole sample and at the monthly level. Finally, we develop an integrated mechanism to analyze the features of words’ networks based on news headlines that can account for all the keywords in the news about a particular event and therefore track the evolution of news deeply and rapidly.
Highlights
With the development and popularization of information and network technology, the Internet has become the main medium from which people obtain information and news
In the initial gathered data, there were 49 pieces of duplicate news form the same media at the same time and four news duplicate pieces of news before the event occurred in the 748 news stories about the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill and 29 pieces of duplicate news from the same media at the same time and eight duplicate news pieces from before the event occurred in the 739 news about the 2011 Bohai Bay oil spill
We studied an infrequently considered but quite important method for developing a rapid and deep understanding of all the websites and all the news regarding one topic which integrates statistics, word segmentation, complex network theory and visualization to analyze all the online news headlines’ keywords and their evolution regarding two trending events, the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the 2011 Bohai Bay oil spill
Summary
With the development and popularization of information and network technology, the Internet has become the main medium from which people obtain information and news. The web (and a search engine) is the first source a person turns to for information or news [4]. There are a total of 38 pages regarding the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill and 37 pages regarding the 2011 Bohai Bay oil spill. We captured the title, media source, date and time by two different labels, and we automatically gathered all 1,487 pieces of Chinese news on 29 October 2014 about the 2011 Bohai Bay oil spill and the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. After data cleaning, we obtained 695 pieces of news about the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill and 702 pieces of news about the 2011 Bohai Bay oil spill
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