Structure and Content of the Discourse on Climate Change in the Blogosphere: The Big Picture

Topically-focused Blog Corpora for Multiple Languages

“…One exception is our previous development of a large climate change blog corpus (Salway et al, 2013;Elgesem et al, 2015). However, the method used in that work was somewhat ad hoc in its selection of blogs when crawling.…”

“…As discussed in 4.4 this leads to some important blogs being missed but this could remedied by selecting further blogs based on link data from the initial corpus and human judgement. Of course, a different approach would be to gather all blogs by crawling from an initial set of seed blogs, as we did in previous work (Salway et al, 2013;Elgesem et al, 2015). Two reasons seem to count against such an approach: (i) in fragmented blogospheres crawling may miss communities that are weakly connected to the rest; (ii) ensuring only topical blogs are included could entail downloading and analyzing a prohibitively large amount of most websites visited.…”

“…whether they do indeed provide a new platform for open democratic participation (Benkler, 2007), or whether a minority of blogs get most of the attention (Hindman, 2008). Researchers have studied the roles of blogs in connection with political campaigns (Adamic and Glance, 2005;Bruns and Jacobs, 2006;Moe, 2011) and controversial political issues, like climate change, where the diffusion of information may influence the formation of opinions (Sharman, 2014;Elgesem et al, 2015). One aspect is whether the linking practices of bloggers contribute to the polarization of online political debate and the fragmentation of the online public sphere (Sunstein, 2008).…”

Chanting to the choir: the dialogical failure of antithetical climate change blogs

“…As Schäfer [2012, p. 529] notes the climate science debate makes for a rich 'blogosphere' (defined as all the blogs on a specific topic, and their interconnections) where climate science proponents and deniers are seen to be "very present online". It is virtually impossible to count the total number of blogs addressing climate change [Elgesem, Steskal and Diakopoulos, 2014]. Rather than being representative of the climate change blogosphere, the study presented in this paper provides an in-depth examination of the engagement occurring among publics on both sides of a highly controversial issue: climate change.…”

The Circulation of Climate Change Denial Online: Rhetorical and Networking Strategies on Facebook

“…The Internet is simultaneously portrayed as a democratizing technology that enables the flourishing of the public sphere and as a tool that leads to isolation, polarization, and echo chambers (e.g., Papacharissi, 2002;van Dijck, 2013;Zappen, 2005). Increasingly, new media technologies are playing an important role in scientific and environmental communication (e.g., Adams & Gynnild, 2013;Elgesem, Steskal, & Diakopoulos, 2015;Haider, 2016;Walter, Brüggemann, & Engesser, 2018). The ways in which discourse circulates has taken on a new dimension: an electronic, networked form.…”