Visual Analysis of Public Discourse on Environmental Issues

Abstract

The public discourse on environmental issues employs the news media and the emerging consumer generated media as its primary communication channels. Analyzing the use of these channels by the various discourse participants yields valuable insight into the status of opinion formation on environmental problems. This chapter outlines common methods for the monitoring and visualization of public discourse in the news media and it proposes requirements for the application of such methods to environmental discourse. The integration of geospatial visualizations with semantic dimensions and numeric data is identified as the key challenge in visualizing public discourse on environmental issues. A showcase application which addresses this challenge is briefly presented.