Higher Seminar in Journalism, 2021

Climate change and social media: Extracting and analysing Twitter data to study how users connected extreme weather events and climate change during 2008–2017.
Professor Peter Berglez (Jönköping) and Associate Professor Walid al-Saqaf (Södertörn)

Scientific discourse on the link between extreme weather and climate change comes to be commented, reused, and transformed by politics, education, popular culture, art, everyday life discourse, and not least mass media, in which partly new ideas and ways of reasoning might develop. In this respect, social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter are increasingly important spaces for such recontextualized communication (Fairclough, 1995), and give important clues about society’s awareness of the link between extreme weather and climate change (Cody et al., 2015). In the light of this, the seminar covers the process and challenges of extracting and analyzing data from Twitter based on experiences of a research study on how Twitter users connected climate change to extreme weather patterns during 2008-2017. Periods of significant growth are interpreted as involving dynamic relationships between three factors, namely mediated highlighting of previous or ongoing extreme-weather events (extreme-event factor); connection of extreme weather to climate change by traditional media or other intermediaries (media-driven science communication factor); and actions of individual users (digital-action factor).

Further, the seminar include an introduction of the open-source tool used in the project, namely Mecodify, which allows researchers to minimize the time and effort required to extract tweets and obtain key insights in the form of tables, graphs and machine-readable data. The presentation also goes into some detail to describe the steps that were taken from the selection of the period and search keywords to the stages of data analysis and visualisation. Although Mecodify facilitated the process significantly, some challenges were confronted. Among them was the difficulty to extract and interpret large historical datasets from Twitter extending years in the past as well as to meet the ethical guidelines on personal data and GDPR compliance. The seminar concludes with some key learnings from this process and ideas moving forward, with a particular focus on climate change/sustainability oriented issues.