Coral Bleaching

CORAL bleaching REPORT

Introduction The global warming debate has often been focused on what is necessary to do in order to artificially reduce the damage caused by the increase of temperatures without causing further damage, of different nature and maybe worse.

In particular coastal protection, both of human, animals and plants, is now a hot theme in the discussion because every environmental alteration affects each facet of the biological and human ecosystem. In this report we have chosen a specific theme and we tried to analyse its aspects based on who showed interest on the web and how these interests related to each other.

The emerging picture for sure doesn’t give any answer to the question “what can we do?�, but clearly explicits who is pondering on the problem.

1

A short excursus on the theme’s definition The chapter in the 2011 IPCC report that we had to analyse in the previous projectual phase, “Coastal system and low laying areas”, Chapter 6, analyses the possible scenario that the climate change can induce in the coastal areas.

Therefore the first step to define the controversy has been the individuation of debates, still very generic, that emerged about this argument. The report highlighted two discussion areas: adaptation modalities that human should develop in order to reduce global change damages and the severity of environmental impact on coastal flora and coastal fauna, especially on mangrooves and coral reefs.

Following this, we started a more specific and precise web search, till two specific controversies were found: beach nourishment, technique that artificially build part of beach and coral bleaching, corals that becomes white. The latter, in particular, emerged as one of the most devastating damage in the coral reefs ecosystem.

Our final choice felled on the coral bleaching, because during the research we noticed more heterogeneous sources than in the beach nourishment. In fact coral protection is a deeper felt issue and we didn’t find just technical/scientific interventions, 2

but also a lot of articles on news sites and personal blog, deducing that the argument has an extension with a reach on different levels on the web. A further factor of choice has been the presence of many and more specific actors, because from the initial controversy they soon branched out covering and issuing, ample and more articulated debates: the specific case of coral bleaching gradually extended to other contexts, bringing to light economic, social and government themes.

The last decisive point pro-corals has been the curiosity aroused for this problem in our group, making us finally close the first theme-research stage.

A multiple controversy Before specifying the controversy it’s important a short scientific premise.

Corals live in symbiosis with an alga called Zoexanthellae, which gives it a flaming colour and nutrition in exchange for protection. After variations in coastal habitat like temperature increase, marine acidification augmentation, both of them related to the global climate change and some stresses of other nature, has been observed that the coral expels Zoexanthellae, losing its natural colour and becoming white.

As already mentioned, the coral bleaching problem presents different facets that emerged during the first step of qualita-

tive and more specific search made on Google.com.

The first and most immediate controversy that emerges from Internet, as one can easily imagine, is related to the scientific area.

Scientists that study this phenomenon disagree about the cause of the bleaching.

Some of them believe that it’s a coral natural response to the environment changes and that the alga expulsion serve to repair the organism therefore establishes a new, stronger symbiosis: as a result of the bleaching a restoration of the coral’s vital functions occurs healing the coral. Other scientists instead uphold that the bleaching is caused by the excessive habitat changing, due both to the global change and the human interventions, from the tourism to the industry, and that bleaching is a sign of a severe debilitation causing the coral demise. This last group of scientists insist that it’s absolutely necessary a human intervention in order to modify the situation, because coral bleaching is an event that in the last years has happened too frequently. The fact that both phenomena, corals healing and corals death have been observed keeps the controversy alive.

From looking at the point of which of the human intervention is deemed necessary or not, new matters emerged from the web and directly trespass into new contexts.

Coral is not just an environmental asset, but it’s a fundamental economic resource for countries where coral reefs attracts coastal

tourism. A deteriorated or a dead coral is of no interest to the tourist and the loss of this resource brings the matter to the table of national decisions context.

In order to reduce the stress, the governments carried out two strategies: these been the closing down of the fishing and tourist areas. This moves the debate directly up to economic level and introduce into the discussion the plight of the fishing and the diving associations. Researching in Google. com it’s possible to find many opinions by both groups that protest against the restriction of their scope; both stating that they are not the real cause (blaming each other) and the one saying that severe rules would cause too much economic loss for the country, both locally and nationally.

Coral reefs are a national heritage, so the decision about these norms belong to the national government, as demonstrated by the large Acts for the corals safeguard, of which people discuss on the Internet and which sets off the debate between economic areas.

The third level of discussion complementary to the second, is the governmental level, where every country, with its decision, is squeezed not only between the different economic interests, but also between the ethical interests of organizations for the environmental safeguard, not forgetting public opinion, the fourth and more generic debate area that expresses a high interest in the coral bleaching problem.

Definition of the specific research area On observing the big picture serving as a background for the coral bleaching’ debates we initially thought about different research questions that, area by area, investigate into the matter from different points of view, with a protocol sequence for each, showing the manner on how they interact with one another. Unfortunately this plan of action was too extensive for the time at our disposal, so we decided to focus on an area that covers it all; and this area been the government one.

The reason for this choice is because it’s the balance of all the controversies: the governmental entities, in fact, make the decisions and the laws about corals protection in order to avoid the coral bleaching: government interest or indifference to the problem and approval or rejection of saving-reefs measures, brings the following economic debates directly to the public opinion. With our tools we tried to investigate deeper into the interconnection between governments and other areas involved in the matter.

Secondly, we want to show how the information sources about the coral bleaching is connecting with the government ones, if a meeting of common point exist or there is an exchange through favoured portals between them, by first analysing category by category, then delving deeper into the government area and how it links with the other areas. As a last and deeper analysis, we tried to show the websites contents considered and compare the results obtained from all areas, in order to investigate if a common sphere of communication do exist, therefore which are the reference points mentioned and if they are the same.

Because the coral reefs are a territorial component and because the governments are our research focus, all these passages have been constantly compared at geographical level, in order to show the territorial attraction and the interests of logistical and territorial character.

The protocols used will be described during the research steps, but the tools we used were essentially three: Crawler for the relations, Alchemy for the semantic areas and Geo IP to identify the geographical areas interested in the matter.

Research objectives and protocols Our first objective is to map the virtual and physical locations in which the controversy is developed. We tried to investigate which Internet platforms treated the coral bleaching matter and who is interested in it, with particular attention to the government portals.

3

PROTOCOL

GOOGLE “coral bleaching”

V11 WIKIPEDIA

+

GEOIP

17 LANGUAGES

17 researches with relative GOOGLE

300 RESULTS

ALCHEMY

division in 7 CATEGORIES

division in macrosystems

V1 People

CRAWLER

Geographical features

Groups

100 website for each language manual definition of For each category but “GOVERNMENT”

GEOIP for each language

V2

definition of

TRIANGULATION

internal pages + gov. target

definition of countries

manual check

specific type

specific country

maps

SCRIPTOGRAPHER

SCRIPTOGRAPHER

GEPHI MAP

V3-8 manual definition of the category for every target

V10

manual union

V12 GEPHI MAP

SCRIPTOGRAPHER

V9

V13

Corpus definition-missing The first research step conducted was the corpus building.

We searched on Google.com for the “coral bleaching” term and considered the first three hundred results using the Harvester tool, avoiding therefore double sites on the three pages after which we manually removed the not-relevant websites such as Twitter, Facebook and other social networks, Wikipedia etc., in order to obtain a list of the pages discussing the coral bleaching issue with the highest Google ranking.

Each of these links, PDF included, is an information source re coral bleaching, so, for our second step we opened every single page and listed it depending on the belonging typology site, in order to discover “who is interested” and on which platforms people talk about it.

We identified seven categories, on which we formed the base for the entire research: - Organisations, from the most generic WWF to the specific Coral Watch; - Blog or personal websites; - News, information websites; - Universities, from univeristies website to internal departments websites; - Science, from scientific articles aggregator, to research institutes and scientific symposia websites; - Economy, fishing and tourism society websites, hotel websites; - Government, agencies or governmental entities websites.

It’s necessary to make a note for this last category.

To identify the governmental websites we didn’t restrict the research only to the .gov domain because we realised that some governmental entities, for example some specific in the coral protection, even if created by government, didn’t have .gov extension. In these cases the websites have been inserted in the “Governativi” category even if they didn’t have .gov extension.

Every corpus category rates, shows a high majority of Organisations and Personal Website, followed by News category, demonstrating that the theme is very popular with the public opinion and confirming the impression we received during the first researches.

The Government category doesn’t belong to the categories providing a lot of elements, but we are sure that these websites present in the first three Google pages, have a frequent activity on the Web; for this reason they are the most relevant.

SCRAPER OF THE CORPUS

Scraper specific: “coral bleaching”.

government

university

organization

science

blog/personal site

economy

news

5

CORPUS SORTED

BY CATEGORIES A linguistic deviation Corpus from Google.com; categorization.

CORPUS SORTED

BY CATEGORIES

7% 10% 22% 11%

CORPUS

13% 21%

16% organization

government

blog/personal site

science

news

economy

university

6

After this initial stage, before continuing with the indicated objectives, it seemed worthed to make a little deviation extending the research to other languages, because geolocalization is an important point of our project and we didn’t want to restrict it to results in the english language only.

In order to identify the other languages to start a new research, we benefited of two method. The first one is Wikipedia, to identify on the website all the languages which had a “coral bleaching” voice, because if this discussion exists, it means that the public opinion of that country is interested in the matter. The second standard emerged after a Geo IP was made on our corpus english results. We created a list of the countries in which there was at least one IP for website talking about coral bleaching and we thought that if someone in that country wrote in english, we needed to look for websites that were in their own native language.

This allowed us to create a list of seventeen languages, from english to hindi.

Then we went back on Google and we searched the correspondent terms for “coral bleaching” in other languages, changing time and time again the Google preferences for every language.

The visualization V1 shows how the number of results per page for every language changes considerably and, as predictable, the english results were a majority.

V1

THE LANGUAGES OF CORAL BLEACHING

Google

.com

Number of resulting pages for each language from relative Google.

coral bleaching

.co.jp .fr

602.000

English 543.000

Japanese blanchissement des coraux

.co.th

177.000

French

134.000

Thai Chinese

.com.hk

125.000

.it

sbiancamento dei coralli

.es

blanqueo de coral

Spanish

.de

korallenbleiche

German

.co.id

pemutihan karang

Indonesian

.pt

branqueamento do coral

Portuguese

1.560

Hebrew

677

Finnish

373

Norwegian

310

Dutch

78

Arabic

73

Malai

3

Hindi

3

.co.il .fi

korallien vaaleneminen

.no

korallbleking

.nl

verbleking van koraal

.com/intl/ar/ .com.my .co.in

karang pelunturan

58.300

Italian

31.500 24.700 16.600

After this, we created a corpus of 100 websites for each language on the respective Google and on these we made a new multi-language Geo IP (english included), from which visualization V2 resulted, where it’s possible to observe in which language the websites belonging to each country are written, in order to obtain a complete picture of all the countries that host discussions about coral bleaching in their language. The countries which showed less than three IP addresses have been removed.

GEO IP INITIAL CORPUS

Coral research and GeoIp.

First Geo IP fof the initial english corpus, which later has been deepen with new GeoIp of other languauges.

GEO IP INITIAL CORPUS

Because of the english predominance on the web, we continued our work treating the controversy on an international level, picking up from where we started our initial english corpus obtained by Google.com.

143

USA

barrier barrier reef reef

8

32

8

6

4

2

1

Australia

Canada

UK

France Malaysia Netherlands

India Switzerland Singapore Indonesia

Italy Norway Israel Japan

Luxemburg China Belgium Thailand

V2

COUNTRIES INTERESTED IN CORAL BLEACHING

268

91

90

85

100 Google results for each language; GeoIP of each mini-corpus; union of the results.

58

FR

JP

norwegian

japanese

german

dutch

french

indonesian

arabic

chinese

portuguese

malay

thai

hebrew

hindi

italian

finnish

53 44

DE

spanish

82 62

USA

english

TH

IT

IL

BR

ID

38

NO

38

CN

36

TW

31

NL

25

AU

22

UK

16

ES

13

FI

10

10

9

9

8

7

CA

PL

PT

CH

SG

BE

4

4

4

3

3

3

DK

MY

IE

ZA

MX

AR

Relation map for every class On this phase, the objective was to obtain a map describing the relation between all the categories in order to identify not only how much but also in which manner the government websites relate with the others and how the others relate to the government ones i.e. how many government websites are a reference point, reliable and mentionable from the other sources that are interested in coral bleaching.

In order to obtain this information, we used the Crawler tool. First of all it has been necessary to choose the websites to insert the tool, if the single pages directly returned form the research on Google.com or the websites domains themselves. We chose to maintain the single pages, because we wanted to obtain targeted-theme links, avoiding for example the entire amount of external links from a news or a university website, but maintaining the ones present in the article in which coral bleaching is the focal interest. The choice was directed towards the Organizations and Government categories.

We used the website domains every time we met organizations or government entities that worked only on coral safe-guard: in that case we thought that it would be interesting to maintain the entire range of external links offered by the website.

For the large amount of PDF present in the corpus, we couldn’t insert them directly into the tool, so we chose, case by case, the 10

more suitable page to insert into the Crawler, usually the page that launched the link from the PDF itself.

With a Crawler for each category we obtained internal and external links (target) of every corpus websites. We wanted to know which results belonged to the government context, so we analysed everyone of the six classes target (Government excluded) which were ...gov. and knowing that some governmental websites don’t have the ...gov. domain, we triangulated (looking for common websites) these results with the initial corpus of the Government category, so as to also obtain the common ones that are not ...gov. From this step we obtained a quite complete list of all the government target websites.

ernment category.

Let’s proceed now with a short view of what it emerged.

In visualizations V3 we can see how all the organization websites are linked to eachother, and between all is dominant the IUNC (International Union for Conservation of Nature), a global organization for the environmental safeguard, that has a large number of external links. The government websites are frequent and they are well distributed on the map.

In order to visualize the categories maps we used the Gephi tool. From every map, except for the moment the Government one, we wanted to show how many pages were internal at the websites (indegree), in order to determine how many starting websites (sources) auto-linked themselves, how many links referred to the external website (outdegree), in order to identify if the class was open to the others and if it had many external links, and, between these, which were governmental. With a colour and a tabulation chart, we obtained six visualizations (V3 - V8) in which internal websites examined pages are coloured like their own category. The outdegree are all grey except for the governmental websites, that are coloured, instead, like the Gov-

V5 for the News class shows a well-balanced view, in which news websites don’t link eachother, obviously, but they often refer to the same external websites. It’s interesting to see how in this case the governmental websites are very restricted and limited to only some sources, while they have never been mentioned by other sources. Maybe national sources are not a reference point for the media.

In V4 for the blog and personal website category the situation is similar, but less polarized. The interconnections between sources are elevated also in this case, while the references to the governmental websites are few and less homogeneous.

As for Organizations and Blogs, University websites (V6) have a lot of external links too.

One of these is JCU, James Cook University, an Australian university with the largest number of links and references to the governmental websites.

V3

“ORGANIZATION” RELATIONSHIP MAP

IUCN.ORG

1 source site

(dots dimension depends on the number of internal links)

external site governmental site 1 rank - min 42+ rank - max

Tabs from Crawler; elaboration; use of Gephi.

GLOBALCORAL.ORG

V4

“BLOG/PERSONAL SITE” RELATIONSHIP MAP

Tabs from Crawler; elaboration; use of Gephi.

WUNDERGROUND.COM

RESNET.WM

GREENBLOGS.COM

1 source site

(dots dimension depends on the number of internal links)

external site governmental link 1 rank - min 42+ rank - max

WATTSUPWITHTHAT.COM

AFRICANALCHEMY.WORDPRESS.COM

V5

“NEWS” RELATIONSHIP MAP

Tabs from Crawler; elaboration; use of Gephi.

MSNBC.MSN.COM

STARADVERTISER.COM

NEWS.MONGABAY.COM

THEAUSTRALIAN.COM.AU

REUTERS.COM

INSIDECLIMATENEWS.ORG

1 source site

(dots dimension depends on the number of internal links)

external site governmental site 1 rank - min 42+ rank - max

THESTAR.COM

SMH.COM.AU

V6

“UNIVERSITY” RELATIONSHIP MAP

Tabs from Crawler; elaboration; use of Gephi.

E2CCB.ORG CARTERETCOUNTYSCHOOLS.ORG

JCU.EDU.AV

NOVA.EDU

TAU.AC.IL 1 source site

(dots dimension depends on the number of internal links)

external site governmental site 1 rank - min 42+ rank - max

MARINE.UQ.EDU.AU

V7

“SCIENCE” RELATIONSHIP MAP

Tabs from Crawler; elaboration; use of Gephi.

OCEANDOCS.NET

IAS.AC.IN

BIOMEDCENTRAL.COM REEF.CRC.ORG.AU

1 source site

(dots dimension depends on the number of internal links)

external site governmental site 1 rank - min 42+ rank - max

V8

“ECONOMY” RELATIONSHIP MAP

Tabs from Crawler; elaboration; use of Gephi.

BONAIREBLISS.COM

COREMAP.OR.ID

LANTAOLDTOWN.COM

AMBERGRISCAYE.COM

REEFTEACH.COM.AU

TRAVELWITHACHALLENGE.COM.ORG

SCUBADIVINGPHUKET.NET

1 source site

(dots dimension depends on the number of internal links)

external site governmental site 1 rank - min 42+ rank - max

FISHINGNJ.ORG

On a reduced scale, the scientific websites map (V7) has the same trend, and we can see that in this case also the governmental websites are well-distributed.

In V8 on economic websites, despite the little amount of links, is interesting to see how the governmental websites are respectively linked to a diving and fishing websites, meaning that in the relation mapping the economic sources refer also to the governmental sources.

The Government category map (V9) is quite particular and it requested a longer job. We were interesting in knowing to which other category every source-link was sent, so we manually replaced all the target-link in the other categories, obtaining a more complex visualization in which every spot-link is coloured like its belonging category. From this visualization it became apparent that governmental websites are very well linked to eachother and they form the major part of the unity map. In the websites catalogued to other categories we notice an almost inexistent presence of blogs and personal sites and a low presence of economic entities, while we can see collaborations between universities, scientific research sites and organizations (the most present category after the governmental one). From this visualizations we learned how the Government refers to itself, without excluding collaborations with other “official� entities, such as organizations and universities, even if in a smaller proportion.

17

V9

“GOVERNMENT” RELATIONSHIP MAP

Tabs from Crawler; elaboration; use of Gephi.

NOAAWATCH.GOV

EHPO3.NIEHS.NIH.GOV

HAWAII.GOV

NATURE.NPS.GOV

REFEED.EDU.AU

OSDPD.NOAA.GOV

CORALREEFWATCH.NOAA.GOV

1 source site

(dots dimension depends on the number of internal links) (color depends on category)

1 rank - min 42+ rank - max

CORALREEF.GOV

AIMS.GOV.AU

BOM.GOV.AU

external site

OCEANSERVICE.NOAA.GOV

government organization blog/personal site news

university science economy not found

EC.EUROPA.EU

Classes relations Another point of interest further to the individual category trade behaviour was the relation between every category and the government, so we thought that it was necessary to obtain some specific focus on this last category, free from disturbing elements such as little interconnected websites or sites just focused on governmental link.

The resulting visualizations, V10.1, V10.2, V10.3 and V10.4 were made by using a combination of table triangulations and by manually checking every step during the operation.

The first visualization borns from the necessity to observe how much the category relates to its internal, i.e. how many government websites give importance to the government websites; it’s a specific zoom on the links that happen inside at the Government corpus. Every link connection is explicit, showing its source and its destination, and the thickness determines the number of mentions; every spot-link is proportional to the number of its internal pages, while the second level of size represents how much it’s linked from the other websites. From this visualization one can see how there is a discreet level of relation between the major part of the analysed governmental websites. In particular the NOAA sections (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), have a relevant weight and seem to be very accredited from the other source of governmental information such as the GBRMPA

(Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority), authority for the safeguard of Great Barrier and AIMS (Australian Institute of Marine Science), governmental research institute.

Secondly, it has been interesting to investigate how much our governmental corpus is accredited from the other categories. In the second visualization we can see links between the six categories and the websites belonging to the governmental one. We can see how NOAA, GBRMPA and AIMS are the most linked also from the websites belonging to the other categories. It emerges the connection imbalance between categories such as Organizations and Blogs. The first one has a numerous links, indicating a strong collaboration with the governmental entities; the second one has few links and nearly all of them are addressed to the NOAA sections; this demonstrates how a single person doesn’t give importance to the governments, and to the more famous structure such as NOAA. We can say the same for the News category, that presents few links even if they are more diversified. The Economy and Science categories even if starting out from a less meaty corpus, have a large number of links to the government entities, probably considered interlocutors in the matter of coral safeguard.

Finally we investigated a further level of “inter-relation”, so we found those websites that don’t belong to the corpus, but that are connect to two or more corpus websites.

For the third visualization we triangulated the target results of the Organization categories and we considered the ones that are common to at least two sources. We can observe how another NOAA section is the most relevant and connected website but so is the ReefHQ, an Australia aquarium in Queensland which is considered like an “economic structure”, probably because of a close collaboration with the Australian authority for the coral protection. In the other mentioned websites, we see again the relation with the organizations and, secondly, with the universities, even if they have less links respect to the other ones mentioned before.

For the last visualization we considered just the governmental target websites common to at least two sources websites in all the categories. Again, it emerges the little relevance that News and Blog give to the governmental websites, and again we see another NOAA department, linked to the other governmental websites, but it’s surprising the entry of a new site: the NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information), a USA scientific governmental centre, that is not present in the first 300 Google websites, meaning that it doesn’t have an high ranking, it’s not mentioned from the other corpus governmental websites, but it seems to be a point of reference for the scientific and organizations area, maybe because of its scientific and not political role.

19

V10.1

“GOVERNMENT” SITES

usgcrp

Use of Crawler; elaboration and triangulation; manual visualization.

nature.nps

reefbase

climatecommission

hawaii

bom reefed.edu

data.aims epa

oceanservice.noaa aims

noaawatch.noaa

noaanews.noaa

coralreef

coralreefwatch.noaa osdpd.noaa

coris.noaa

SITES BELONGING TO THE CATEGORY “GOVERNMENT”

1 link - min 7 links - max

sites belonging to “GOVERNMENT”

second level

dots dimension depends on how many internal pages have each site

dots dimension depends on how much the site is linked

nasa state

europa gbrmpa

ehp

V10.2

CATEGORIES AND “GOVERNMENT” RELATIONSHIP

Use of Crawler; elaboration and triangulation; manual visualization.

ECONOMY

usgcrp

nature.nps

reefbase

climatecommission

hawaii

ORGANIZATION

epa

GOVERNMENT

oceanservice.noaa

data.aims

bom reefed.edu

NEWS

noaawatch.noaa

noaanews.noaa

aims

UNIVERSITY

BLOG/PERSONAL SITE

coralreefwatch.noaa osdpd.noaa

SCIENCE

coris.noaa

SITES BELONGING TO THE CATEGORY “GOVERNMENT”

1 link - min 20 links - max

nasa

coralreef

sites belonging to “GOVERNMENT”

second level

dots dimension depends on how many internal pages have each site

dots dimension depends on how many category links share the same “GOVERNMENT” site

state

europa gbrmpa

ehp

V10.3

“GOVERNMENT” EXTERNAL SITES

Use of Crawler; elaboration and triangulation; manual visualization.

SITES BELONGING TO THE CATEGORY “GOVERNMENT”

climatecommission

usgcrp

australia

hhs erin

coral si.edu

reefbase

atlas aodc

hawaii

soton.ac.uk tos

nature.nps

firstgovsearch projectaware

nmfs

epa

reefed.edu

unep

bom

aims

data.aims

usf.edu

oceanservice.noaa

csiro jcu.edu

noaawatch.noaa

qld.gov commerce

osdpd.noaa

noaanews.noaa

usa.gov reefhq

usgs weather

gbrmpa

state

coralreef

coralreefwatch.noaa

noaa doi

coris.noaa

nasa

crc.org imos

europa

search.usa

activefiremaps

ehp

nature navy

fs.fed.us aslo

esa doc

fws

wisc usasearch

COMMON EXTERNAL SITES

1 link - min 10 links - max

sites belonging to “GOVERNMENT” dots dimension depends on how many internal pages have each site (scale ratio +40%)

government organization blog/personal site news

university science economy not found

common external sites dots dimension depends on how many “GOVERNMENT” sites share the same external site (scale ratio +40%)

ready

V10.4

COMMON EXTERNAL GOVERNMENTAL SITES

Use of Crawler; elaboration and triangulation; manual visualization.

GOVERNMENTAL SITES SHARED BY ALL CATEGORIES

navy nsf

energystar cdiac

unep

ECONOMY

1 link - min 50+ links - max

amsa

noaa environment

gefcoral tsra

ORGANIZATION

usgs usaid

NEWS

external governmental link dots dimension depends on how many category links share the same governmental site

qld

GOVERNMENT

deh

ncbi pubmedcentral

UNIVERSITY

fws doi

BLOG/PERSONAL SITE

usa naa

SCIENCE

earthobservatory state.fl

weather

Mentioned elements After having identified the relationship between websites and physical connections of the Internet, we started the next step by researching deeper into finding “who” and “what” websites refers to, comparing the categories and identifying the mentioned elements, both in their typology and in their geographical location.

In order to find a point of comparison on the territorial distribution of these elements, a first visualization V11 picks up our initial corpus Geo IP, showing like the major part of the examined websites come from USA IP, including the ones belonging to the Government category.

ENTITY SET

ORGANIZATION 2

6

Alchemy; manual check.

Percentage of entity typology mentioned univocally per category

BLOG/ PERSONAL SITES

NEWS

12 2

1 27

%

45

43

In order to identify the content of corpus pages we used the Alchemy tool, asking for the return all the Entities; the resulting list has been corrected by hand and every entity has been placed in a macro-set: “people”, “groups”, “geographical features”, “terminology”, “technology” and “weather event”, that we haven’t considered because they were less interesting for the research goal. But this division were too generic for our goals, so with a long and deep Internet search, we identified for every entity the more specific typology: for people we identify scientists and in particular if they were governmental scientists, for groups we identified if they were governmental agencies, organizations or factories etc. At the

11

20

%

56

UNIVERSITY 19

%

1

32

9

2 4

SCIENCE 7

20

%

43

%

terminology

groups

geographical features

weather event

22

%

44 31

technology

3 2

20

%

23

people

1

ECONOMY

31

25

24

GOVERNMENT

2

30

21

same time and manually we searched for the geographical area in which these people or these groups worked. This process was made for all the seven categories.

With this procedure we were able to make a visualization that considered non just which “entities typologies” were the most mentioned in our corpus (with a consistent attention and classification of who works for governmental agencies, in the “people” macro-set, or in the governmental agencies themselves, for the “groups” macro-set), but also where the operative entities area are located.

55 28

18

V11

SITES LOCATION

GEO IP of the corpus; Scriptographer.

USA (145) ORGANIZATION (46)

BLOG/ PERSONAL SITE (45)

CATEGORIES

NEWS (33)

Australia (29)

COUNTRIES Canada (7)

UNIVERSITY (28)

United Kingdom (5) France (4)

GOVERNMENT (23)

Malaysia (4) Switzerland (3)

SCIENCE (21)

Singapore (2)

ECONOMY (15)

Netherlands (2)

Indonesia (2) Italy (1) Japan (1) Thailand (1) Luxembourg (1) India (1) Norway (1) Israel (1) Taiwan (1)

MENTIONED PEOPLE & ORGANIZATIONS TOP TEN In visualizations V12, made by Scriptographer tool, considering how many times every entity is mentioned, we can see how, from every initial category, some entities are extracted, dividing into “people” and “groups”, dividing again in a more specific manner, and how each of them is geographically placed. Scientists are the most mentioned as regards the coral bleaching; after them we can find governmental agencies which are, in the macroset “groups”, the most mentioned from the Government category websites. This shows how government mentions more governmental agencies than scientific research websites, which are actually never mentioned. In the last part of the graph we can see how the majority of the mentioned governmental agencies belong to the USA. While scientists are wellbalanced in both the USA and Australia, one can deduce that even if the USA owns a lot of governmental agencies mentioned in fact of corals, in the scientific context Australia is more influential.

Comparing now visualizations V11 and V12, we can observe two facts: first, categories such as Blog and News, even starting from a higher number of websites, have produced less entities than Universities, which are oriented to the scientific area, in V12 more prominent; secondly, the majority of the websites that in the international area talk about coral bleaching come from the USA (V11), but if we consider the mentioned entities, Australia reduced its distance, demonstrating its relevance in the matter (V12).

26

MENTIONED PEOPLE & ORGANIZATIONS TOP TEN

Alchemy; manual check.

Top 10 people and groups mentioned by the corpus sites.

From the left: post/classification, person/group, nationality and number of mentions.

Scientist of University of Queensland

Hoegh-Guldberg

Scientist of University of Miami

Glynn

Scientist

Brown

Scientist of King Fahd University of Petroleum

Coles

Member of Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network

Wilkinson

191 115 83 71 61 60

President of Global Coral Reef Alliance in Chappaqua Goreau 49

Scientist of Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology

Jokiel

Scientist of University of Queensland

Jones

45

Scientist of Wildlife Conservation Society

McClanahan

43

Coordinator of NOAA

Eakin

Governmental Agency

NOAA

Scientific Research

IPCC

42

Park

Stetson Bank

41

Governmental Agency

Coral Reef Watch

Governmental Agency

NASA

16

Scientific Research

CRC

15

University

Cambridge University

15

Governmental Agency

GBRMPA

14

University

University of Queensland

13

Organization

United Nation

13

USA

United Kingdom

Switzerland

Australia

Saudi Arabia

Caribbean

38

177

20

International

V12

MENTIONED ENTITIES AND THEIR LOCATION

Use of Alchemy and entities categorization; entities localization; Scriptographer.

COUNTRIES MENTIONED PEOPLE

USA (1136)

CATEGORIES

gov. agencies

ORGANIZATION

Australia (602)

ORGANIZATION

BLOG/ PERSONAL SITE NEWS

SCIENTIST (1137)

BLOG/ PERSONAL SITE NEWS

PROFESSOR (245) PRESIDENT (156) gov. agencies

United Kingdom (184)

MEMBER (114) gov. agencies

International (102)

PHYSICIST (5) TECHNICIAN (4) POLITICIAN (2) PHOTOGRAPHER (1) JOURNALIST (1)

Saudi Arabia (73) Israel (67) Caribbean (43) Switzerland (42) Thailand (31)

UNIVERSITY

Canada (30)

UNIVERSITY

MENTIONED GROUPS

France (21) Micronesia (21) Tanzania (21) China (17)

GOVERNMENT SCIENCE ECONOMY

GOVERNMENT

GOVERNMENTAL AGENCY (312)

Germany (15) Japan (15) Maldives (15) Philippines (11)

SCIENCE

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH (128)

Netherlands (9)

ECONOMY

UNIVERSITY (111)

Malaysia (8) Virgin Islands (7) Chile (6) Panama (5) Europe (4) India (4) Singapore (4) Indonesia (3) Costa Rica (2) Bahamas (1) Colombia (1) Kenya (1) Palau (1) Russia (1) Seychelles (1)

ORGANIZATION (103) PARK (77) MEDIA (51) COMPANY (37) WHEATHER BUREAU (16) MUSEUM (8) AQUARIUM (2)

Puerto Rico (9)

Re this purpose, we decided to make a visualization about the territorial entities only, in order to see on which place are more often mentioned. Again, we used the Scriptographer tool, counting how many times every entity appeared.

Using the entities found with Alchemy tool, we manually identified the countries to which these entities belong to, so cities or regions have been connected to the correspondent country, in order to obtain an international classification that clearly returns the attention poles. To point out interesting points (which country mentions which country), the visualization has been made starting from the corpus websites in order to connect every “State that mentions” to the correspondent “country that is mentioned” in the analysed websites: the final result is a detailed return of “who’s talking about who”, or better “where people talk about where”.

To confirm the trend emerged from the previous comparison, also in this case the mentions for “Australia” almost reach the number of “USA”’ ones confirming again the importance of this country in the matter, and we can also observe the presence of another important geographical area, the Caribbean one, that until this level of details was never emerged, nor was found when we considered the other languages, so it should be considered an area that doesn’t treat the matter in a relevant way, that doesn’t have scientists or entities important on a international level, but that is involved 28

in the coral bleaching problem and it’s often mentioned because of its geographical placement.

In this case too, the governmental websites emerged, and they just belong to the USA or Australia. It’s interesting the fact that none of them mentions its own country, USA or Australia, but they are interesting in other regions, in particular in the south-asian area, especially India. It means that probably these websites are not interested just in their area of influence, but they are interested in a more global sense of the problem.

V13

Red Sea

Atlantic Ocean

Mediterranean Sea

Pacific Ocean

Antarctic Ocean

Indian Ocean

Fiji

Samoa Cook Islands Palau

Papua New Guinea

Polynesia

New Zeland

Australia

Vietnam

NORWAY Mauritius

Tanzania

Kenya

Madagascar

Somalia

Thailand

India

Indonesia

Saudi Arabia

Philippines

Maldives

Seychelles

Japan

Israel

Singapore

Malaysia

Taiwan

Sri Lanka

China

Cambodia

Arabian Emirates

ITALY

THAILAND

LUXEMBURG

FRANCE SINGAPORE TAIWAN INDONESIA ISRAEL JAPAN MALAYSIA UNITED KINGDOM SWITZERLAND NETHERLANDS CANADA gov. agencies AUSTRALIA

gov. agencies

USA

Italy Germany

UK

France

Netherlands

Venezuela Antille

Ecuador

Belize

Puerto Rico

Jamaica

Costa Rica

Bahamas

Mexico

Virgin Islands

Panama

Caribbean

USA

MENTIONED PLACES

OCEAN & SEA OCEANIA ASIA AFRICA EUROPE AMERICA

MENTIONING COUNTRIES Geo IP of the corpus; Alchemy for geographical entities; use of Gephi.

MENTIONED PLACES

Conclusion With our research we tried to frame the government information sources positioned on the Web about the coral bleaching. Combining all the datas found and elaborated with the tools and the visualizations obtained, the picture emerged doesn’t make a simple reading or is an easy simplification. The conclusions that we can derive from it is that the governments, on the Internet, refer to themselves, linking other institutions and mentioning governmental agencies; the most evident connection that emerges outside the government area is the one with organizations websites. From the other side, other categories relates in a different way with the government one. Reciprocally, the closest connection emerged from organizations, while the “public opinion” refers to it less frequently respectively to categories such as Science and Economy. So the government is surely an interlocutor, but not of the common people, blog writers or information websites.

When we observe the global positioning of attraction poles related to the coral bleaching, we notice that, in an international context, the USA are predominant and it’s the country that talk about coral bleaching the most but if we investigate on who the attention is placed upon in the discussion, other areas such as Australia are evident with a lot of mentions not only as a country, but it’s also as the homeland of a lot of scientists appointed to research the coral bleaching 30

cause. Where in the governmental area the USA agencies are more often mentioned, in the scientific area Australia is equally important and this maybe is a sign of a geographical polarization of interests: Australia faces the problem from a more scientific point of view while the USA approach is more political.

In conclusion in the case of links and collaborations between different websites, the first connection is between governmental websites and governmental websites, followed by the organizations; contrariwise, in case of “contents” the scientific community is more predominant, followed by the governmental agencies. This could means that governments - in collaboration with organizations - and in particular the USA one, shows a management interest to the problem, with the creation of governmental departments employees and their consequent web activity, but they are not perceived as a “landmark” for the public opinion, while the scientific community remains important, in particular the one of the coral reefs areas such as Australia. The controversy on coral bleaching is far from been solved and because of the potential environmental risk it’s important that people continue to talk about it, but if there is a perception of who can really do something about it in the sense that if governments were to be taken more into consideration from official departments and from the public opinion, the interest would move from the knowledge-science interest to the governmentaction, and maybe that could be a step in the right direction.

Students Stefania Guerra Michela Lazzaroni Roberto Scotti Ilaria Segreto Jlenia Vertemara

Final Synthesis Studio Politecnico di Milano | A.Y. 2011-2012 M.Sc.Communication Design Section C3