Iina Hellsten | University of Amsterdam, ASCoR (original) (raw)
Papers by Iina Hellsten
Scientometrics, Jan 1, 2007
Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science - WebSci '14, 2014
We present a study about gender differences towards anthropogenic impact on climate change, as di... more We present a study about gender differences towards anthropogenic impact on climate change, as discovered from the climate change debate on Twitter. Our dataset consists of about 250,000 tweets and retweets for which the authors' gender was identified. We researched the hashtags and usernames that were proportionately more frequently mentioned by either male or female tweeters. Our results show significant differences between female and male tweeters, with female tweeters mentioning significantly more campaigns and organizations with a convinced attitude towards anthropogenic impact on climate change, and male tweeters mentioning significantly more private persons and usernames with a sceptical stance.
Background/purpose Convenient access to vast and untapped collections of documents generated by o... more Background/purpose
Convenient access to vast and untapped collections of documents generated by organizations is a highly valuable resource for research. These documents (e.g., press releases) are a window into organizational strategies, communication patterns, and organizational behavior. However, the analysis of large document corpora requires appropriate automated methods for text mining and analysis that are able to take into account the redundant and predictable nature of formalized discourse.
Methods
We use a combination of semantic network analysis and network centrality measures to overcome these particular challenges and to explore the dynamic structural space of concepts in formalized documents pertaining to the recent financial crisis.
Data
For our analyses, we collect the press releases of the European Central Bank (ECB) and the United States’ Federal Reserve System (Fed) issued between 2006 and 2013 in order to examine their semantic networks before, during, and after the recent financial crisis. Their press releases are notably impactful in their influence on other financial institutions and society at large, especially during times of financial volatility.
Results
The structural space created from joint centrality metrics reveals salient shifts in the discursive practices of the ECB and Fed. In particular, the Fed exhibits greater attentiveness to the financial crisis especially during the crisis itself, while the ECB’s attention is delayed and increasing steadily. Furthermore, we show both the Fed’s and the ECB’s discourse transitioning into a new “hybrid” state, rather than returning to the pre-crisis status quo.
Conclusions
Examining the semantic networks of organizational text documents, we find that our analytic approach reveals important discursive shifts, which would not have been discovered under traditional text-analytic approaches. We demonstrate the utility of this approach in investigating large text corpora of organizational discourse, and we anticipate our methods to be comparably valuable in the analysis of a large spectrum of formal and informal discourse.
International Journal of Communication 9(27), 106-132
JASIST, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, DOI: 10.1002/asi.23528, 2015
In September 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its Working Group 1 rep... more In September 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its Working Group 1 report, the first comprehensive assessment of physical climate science in six years, constituting a critical event in the societal debate about climate change. This paper analyses the nature of this debate in one public forum: Twitter. Using statistical methods, tweets were analyzed to discover the hashtags used when people tweeted about the IPCC report, and how Twitter users formed communities around their conversational connections. In short, the paper presents the topics and tweeters at this particular moment in the climate debate. The most used hashtags related to themes of science, geographical location and social issues connected to climate change. Particularly noteworthy were tweets connected to Australian politics, US politics, geoengineering and fracking. Three communities of Twitter users were identified. Researcher coding of Twitter users showed how these varied according to geographical location and whether users were supportive, unsupportive or neutral in their tweets about the IPCC. Overall, users were most likely to converse with users holding similar views. However, qualitative analysis suggested the emergence of a community of Twitter users, predominantly based in the UK, where greater interaction between contrasting views took place. This analysis also illustrated the presence of a campaign by the non-governmental organization Avaaz, aimed at increasing media coverage of the IPCC report.
Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 2014
ABSTRACT Climate change and imagined futures are intricately linked, discussed by policy-makers a... more ABSTRACT Climate change and imagined futures are intricately linked, discussed by policy-makers and reported in the media. In this article we focus on the construction of future expectations in the press coverage of the 1992 and 2012 United Nations conferences in Rio de Janeiro in British and Dutch national newspapers. We use a novel combination of methods, semantic co-word networks and metaphor analysis, to study imagined futures. Our findings show that between 1992 and 2012 there was an overall shift from future-oriented hope to past-oriented disappointment regarding implementing international agreements on climate change policy, but with subtle and interesting differences between the UK and The Netherlands. Certain national differences seem to be stable over time and are indicative of rather dissimilar policy cultures in two nations which are geographically quite close.
Environmental Communication 9(2): 149-152. DOI:10.1080/17524032.2015.1029297 , 2015
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19(4):1024–1041 , 2014
This paper offers a framework for examining the relationship between social, instrumental, and te... more This paper offers a framework for examining the relationship between social, instrumental, and technological determinants of participation through social media using a discursive approach based in the concepts of frames and framing . We apply our multideterminant framework to investigate participatory dynamics on YouTube in the case of climategate. Our interpretive analysis of videos and comments shows how public responses to climategate were scripted around 3 dominant master frames, reinforced by calls to collective action and media form. Our multideterminant framework makes a contribution to the debate over the transformative potential of social media by providing a method to assess the relative value of social media in response to specific social problems. Dutch part of the Climate change as a complex social issue -project (ORA-NWO). Her research has focused on the politics of metaphors, the dynamics of social avalanches in communication networks, and the development of new methods for the analysis of Web-based texts.
This paper contains an exploratory study of networks of activist groups operating versus firms to... more This paper contains an exploratory study of networks of activist groups operating versus firms to impact norms on corporate social responsibility. It provides some initial examinations of using webmetrics to trace activist networks and tactics. We conducted an empirical study of an organization that acts like the proverbial “spider in the web” in activist networks in the Netherlands: SOMO, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations. Mapping such an organization, in which networks on several themes related to CSR are coordinated, ...
The Nordicom review of Nordic mass communication research, 2003
KNAW Narcis. Back to search results. Publication Promises of healthier future: Medical genetics o... more KNAW Narcis. Back to search results. Publication Promises of healthier future: Medical genetics on Finnish television news 1987-2000 (2003). Pagina-navigatie: Main. ...
Housing Studies, 2003
Disclaimer/Klachtenregeling Meent u dat de digitale beschikbaarstelling van bepaald materiaal inb... more Disclaimer/Klachtenregeling Meent u dat de digitale beschikbaarstelling van bepaald materiaal inbreuk maakt op enig recht dat u toekomt of uw (privacy)belangen schaadt, dan kunt u dit onderbouwd aan de Universiteitsbibliotheek laten weten. Bij een gegronde klacht zal de ...
Information Research
Introduction. We assess the extent to which published media timelines reflect contemporary electr... more Introduction. We assess the extent to which published media timelines reflect contemporary electronic discussions of major media events, using the London Attacks of July 2005 as a case study. The main objective is to judge whether timelines could, in principle, be automatically generated from contemporary debates. A secondary objective is to analyse the reasons for differences between contemporary debates and retrospective media timelines. Method. Our method exploits the new opportunities for large-scale analysis afforded by electronic news feeds and blogs. We compared published media timelines with blog postings and news stories related to the London attacks of July, 2005. Rich Site Summary (RSS) technology was used to gather data from 19,587 blog and news sites. For the period of July 7 to July 31 we identified an average of 275 sources a day that posted new information containing the word 'London'. These postings, a combination of blogging and news stories, formed the raw...
Scientometrics, Jan 1, 2007
Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science - WebSci '14, 2014
We present a study about gender differences towards anthropogenic impact on climate change, as di... more We present a study about gender differences towards anthropogenic impact on climate change, as discovered from the climate change debate on Twitter. Our dataset consists of about 250,000 tweets and retweets for which the authors' gender was identified. We researched the hashtags and usernames that were proportionately more frequently mentioned by either male or female tweeters. Our results show significant differences between female and male tweeters, with female tweeters mentioning significantly more campaigns and organizations with a convinced attitude towards anthropogenic impact on climate change, and male tweeters mentioning significantly more private persons and usernames with a sceptical stance.
Background/purpose Convenient access to vast and untapped collections of documents generated by o... more Background/purpose
Convenient access to vast and untapped collections of documents generated by organizations is a highly valuable resource for research. These documents (e.g., press releases) are a window into organizational strategies, communication patterns, and organizational behavior. However, the analysis of large document corpora requires appropriate automated methods for text mining and analysis that are able to take into account the redundant and predictable nature of formalized discourse.
Methods
We use a combination of semantic network analysis and network centrality measures to overcome these particular challenges and to explore the dynamic structural space of concepts in formalized documents pertaining to the recent financial crisis.
Data
For our analyses, we collect the press releases of the European Central Bank (ECB) and the United States’ Federal Reserve System (Fed) issued between 2006 and 2013 in order to examine their semantic networks before, during, and after the recent financial crisis. Their press releases are notably impactful in their influence on other financial institutions and society at large, especially during times of financial volatility.
Results
The structural space created from joint centrality metrics reveals salient shifts in the discursive practices of the ECB and Fed. In particular, the Fed exhibits greater attentiveness to the financial crisis especially during the crisis itself, while the ECB’s attention is delayed and increasing steadily. Furthermore, we show both the Fed’s and the ECB’s discourse transitioning into a new “hybrid” state, rather than returning to the pre-crisis status quo.
Conclusions
Examining the semantic networks of organizational text documents, we find that our analytic approach reveals important discursive shifts, which would not have been discovered under traditional text-analytic approaches. We demonstrate the utility of this approach in investigating large text corpora of organizational discourse, and we anticipate our methods to be comparably valuable in the analysis of a large spectrum of formal and informal discourse.
International Journal of Communication 9(27), 106-132
JASIST, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, DOI: 10.1002/asi.23528, 2015
In September 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its Working Group 1 rep... more In September 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its Working Group 1 report, the first comprehensive assessment of physical climate science in six years, constituting a critical event in the societal debate about climate change. This paper analyses the nature of this debate in one public forum: Twitter. Using statistical methods, tweets were analyzed to discover the hashtags used when people tweeted about the IPCC report, and how Twitter users formed communities around their conversational connections. In short, the paper presents the topics and tweeters at this particular moment in the climate debate. The most used hashtags related to themes of science, geographical location and social issues connected to climate change. Particularly noteworthy were tweets connected to Australian politics, US politics, geoengineering and fracking. Three communities of Twitter users were identified. Researcher coding of Twitter users showed how these varied according to geographical location and whether users were supportive, unsupportive or neutral in their tweets about the IPCC. Overall, users were most likely to converse with users holding similar views. However, qualitative analysis suggested the emergence of a community of Twitter users, predominantly based in the UK, where greater interaction between contrasting views took place. This analysis also illustrated the presence of a campaign by the non-governmental organization Avaaz, aimed at increasing media coverage of the IPCC report.
Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 2014
ABSTRACT Climate change and imagined futures are intricately linked, discussed by policy-makers a... more ABSTRACT Climate change and imagined futures are intricately linked, discussed by policy-makers and reported in the media. In this article we focus on the construction of future expectations in the press coverage of the 1992 and 2012 United Nations conferences in Rio de Janeiro in British and Dutch national newspapers. We use a novel combination of methods, semantic co-word networks and metaphor analysis, to study imagined futures. Our findings show that between 1992 and 2012 there was an overall shift from future-oriented hope to past-oriented disappointment regarding implementing international agreements on climate change policy, but with subtle and interesting differences between the UK and The Netherlands. Certain national differences seem to be stable over time and are indicative of rather dissimilar policy cultures in two nations which are geographically quite close.
Environmental Communication 9(2): 149-152. DOI:10.1080/17524032.2015.1029297 , 2015
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19(4):1024–1041 , 2014
This paper offers a framework for examining the relationship between social, instrumental, and te... more This paper offers a framework for examining the relationship between social, instrumental, and technological determinants of participation through social media using a discursive approach based in the concepts of frames and framing . We apply our multideterminant framework to investigate participatory dynamics on YouTube in the case of climategate. Our interpretive analysis of videos and comments shows how public responses to climategate were scripted around 3 dominant master frames, reinforced by calls to collective action and media form. Our multideterminant framework makes a contribution to the debate over the transformative potential of social media by providing a method to assess the relative value of social media in response to specific social problems. Dutch part of the Climate change as a complex social issue -project (ORA-NWO). Her research has focused on the politics of metaphors, the dynamics of social avalanches in communication networks, and the development of new methods for the analysis of Web-based texts.
This paper contains an exploratory study of networks of activist groups operating versus firms to... more This paper contains an exploratory study of networks of activist groups operating versus firms to impact norms on corporate social responsibility. It provides some initial examinations of using webmetrics to trace activist networks and tactics. We conducted an empirical study of an organization that acts like the proverbial “spider in the web” in activist networks in the Netherlands: SOMO, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations. Mapping such an organization, in which networks on several themes related to CSR are coordinated, ...
The Nordicom review of Nordic mass communication research, 2003
KNAW Narcis. Back to search results. Publication Promises of healthier future: Medical genetics o... more KNAW Narcis. Back to search results. Publication Promises of healthier future: Medical genetics on Finnish television news 1987-2000 (2003). Pagina-navigatie: Main. ...
Housing Studies, 2003
Disclaimer/Klachtenregeling Meent u dat de digitale beschikbaarstelling van bepaald materiaal inb... more Disclaimer/Klachtenregeling Meent u dat de digitale beschikbaarstelling van bepaald materiaal inbreuk maakt op enig recht dat u toekomt of uw (privacy)belangen schaadt, dan kunt u dit onderbouwd aan de Universiteitsbibliotheek laten weten. Bij een gegronde klacht zal de ...
Information Research
Introduction. We assess the extent to which published media timelines reflect contemporary electr... more Introduction. We assess the extent to which published media timelines reflect contemporary electronic discussions of major media events, using the London Attacks of July 2005 as a case study. The main objective is to judge whether timelines could, in principle, be automatically generated from contemporary debates. A secondary objective is to analyse the reasons for differences between contemporary debates and retrospective media timelines. Method. Our method exploits the new opportunities for large-scale analysis afforded by electronic news feeds and blogs. We compared published media timelines with blog postings and news stories related to the London attacks of July, 2005. Rich Site Summary (RSS) technology was used to gather data from 19,587 blog and news sites. For the period of July 7 to July 31 we identified an average of 275 sources a day that posted new information containing the word 'London'. These postings, a combination of blogging and news stories, formed the raw...
The issue of climate change is intimately linked to notions of risk and uncertainty, concepts tha... more The issue of climate change is intimately linked to notions of risk and uncertainty, concepts that pose challenges to climate science, climate change communication and science-society interactions. While a large majority of climate scientists are increasingly certain about many aspects of their assessment of climate change, as detailed in recent reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in particular the fourth assessment report published in 2007(1) and the fifth one published in 2013 and 2014(2), many lay people still perceive climate science to be beset with or hiding uncertainties. Some social scientists and communication researchers have therefore begun to advocate moving from a language of uncertainty to a language of risk. It is claimed that this shift in framing is essential in order to generate greater public support for climate mitigation policies. We examine how shifting to a risk frame might play out in society.
Four years after the completion of the Human Genome Project, the US National Institutes for Healt... more Four years after the completion of the Human Genome Project, the US National Institutes for Health launched the Human Microbiome Project on 19 December 2007. Using metaphor analysis, this article investigates reporting in English-language newspapers on advances in microbiomics from 2003 onwards, when the word “microbiome” was first used. This research was said to open up a “new frontier” and was conceived as a “second human genome project”, this time focusing on the genomes of microbes that inhabit and populate humans rather than focusing on the human genome itself. The language used by scientists and by the journalists who reported on their research employed a type of metaphorical framing that was very different from the hyperbole surrounding the decipherment of the “book of life”. Whereas during the HGP genomic successes had been mainly framed as being based on a unidirectional process of reading off information from a passive genetic or genomic entity, the language employed to discuss advances in microbiomics frames genes, genomes and life in much more active and dynamic ways.