Abstract
In the face of uprisings and revolutions happening in several countries within short period of time (Arab Spring 2011), the need for fast network assessments is compelling. In this article we present a rapid network assessment approach which uses a vast amount of pre-indexed news data to provide up-to-date overview and orientation in emerging and ongoing incidents. We describe the fully automated process of preparing the data and creating the dynamic meta-networks. We also describe the network analytical measures that we are using to identify important topics, persons, organizations, and locations in these networks. With our rapid network modeling and analysis approach first results can be provided within hours. In the explorative study of this article we use 108,000+ articles from 600+ English written news sources discussing Egypt, Libya, and Sudan within a time period of 18 months to show an application scenario of our approach. In particular we are looking at the involvement of other countries and their politicians during time periods of major incidents.
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Notes
As week 1 starts on Monday, January 3rd, New Year’s Day is part of week 52.
For Russia Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev are both players in international media but Putin is more important.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported in part by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), United States Navy (ONR MURI N000140811186, ONR MMV N00014060104). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Office of Naval Research or the U.S. government. The authors wish to acknowledge Jeff Reminga who has been instrumental in developing much of the related technology and Bradley Schmerl for his endeavor to include the data-to-network process of this article into SORASCS.
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Pfeffer, J., Carley, K.M. Rapid modeling and analyzing networks extracted from pre-structured news articles. Comput Math Organ Theory 18, 280–299 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-012-9122-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-012-9122-1