Risk Attention Ecologies: Mapping Socio-Symbolic Constellations of Climate and COVID-19 via Social Media Data

Using semi-automated quantitative approaches (incl. supervised machine learning) alongside online-ethnographic (‘netnographic’) observations, the project explores whether the COVID-19 pandemic crowded out or, conversely, re-energized public-political attention to climate politics and the green transition in Scandinavia.

Did the COVID-19 pandemic crowd out or, conversely, re-energize government, business, and civil society attention to, and plans for, green transition across Scandinavia? In search of answers, this project develops a new digital research methodology, based on combining large-scale, unstructured textual and visual social media data with online ethnography to map and compare socio-symbolic constellations (Fuhse et al. 2020) of collective actors and their symbolic positions across countries. Unstructured textual and visual data from social media platforms spur innovative method developments in digital, computational, and social data science; yet proper methodological protocols for leveraging such data for sociological and wider social-science insight are still lacking. This project extends prior computational data work on how NGOs and others co-articulate climate and COVID-19 risk issues on social media. In doing so, the project forges a novel approach to mapping media ecologies as socio-symbolic constellations via combinations of quantitative and qualitative techniques.

Funded by:

Risk Attention Ecologies has received a three year funding from University of Copenhagen Data+ programme 

Project: Risk Attention Ecologies
Period:  2021-2024

Contact

Associate Professor Anders Blok
Mail: abl@soc.ku.dk
+45 35 32 35 77