This project is the result of a 3-day intensive workshop on digital methods and data visualization given by the Density Design Lab (Milan) and the Sciences Po-Médialab (Paris).
During the workshop, we explored all the articles related to Lebanon published by The Guardian from 2005 to 2012 (4,634 articles in total), to understand how Lebanon is perceived abroad: who are the main actors, relations and most relevant topics.
The aim of the workshop was to unveil unexpected stories by extracting meaning from big digital datasets by creating different visualizations.
First, we had enrich the data at hand by giving each of the 4,000 entities an attribute (i.e. foreign places, foreign people, institutions, etc.) After that we created network graphs in order to show the existing relations between the entities in the articles by using Gephi.
The size of the nodes corresponds to the frequency of each entity in the given timeframe and the edges between the nodes appear if the entities are found in the same article. The thickness of the edges (or connections) corresponds to the frequency in which these 2 entities appear in the same article.
The particular timeframe that I worked on was April to June 2006: the events that eventually led to the July 2006 war in Lebanon. Most of the terms are pretty expected when mentioning Lebanon in the press:
Israel, Syria, Iraq, Washington & Palestine...
The 2 clusters here are:
1. the Israeli-Palestinian war.
2. the investigations and skepticism created around the Muslim community in London following the bombings
1. the Israeli-Palestinian war.
2. the investigations and skepticism created around the Muslim community in London following the bombings
from the year earlier.
But the are some stand-outs: Europe is mentioned so many times although it does not seem related to the central action. The corresponding event: the heat wave in the summer of 2006 in Europe. Also, the frequent mention of football relates to the World Cup that took place in 2006.
For more about the workshop, click here.
