Media Watch on Climate Change -- Visual Analytics for Aggregating and Managing Environmental Knowledge from Online Sources

This paper presents the Media Watch on Climate Change, a public Web portal that captures and aggregates large archives of digital content from multiple stakeholder groups. Each week it assesses the domain-specific relevance of millions of documents and user comments from news media, blogs, Web 2.0 platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the Web sites of companies and NGOs, and a range of other sources. An interactive dashboard with trend charts and complex map projections not only shows how often and where environmental information is published, but also provides a real-time account of concepts that stakeholders associate with climate change. Positive or negative sentiment is computed automatically, which not only sheds light on the impact of education and public outreach campaigns that target environmental literacy, but also help to gain a better understanding of how others perceive climate-related issues.