Panchendrarajan, Rrubaa; Popova, Gergana and Russell-Rose, Tony. 2024. Crisis talk: analysis of the public debate around the energy crisis and cost of living. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 14, 74. ISSN 1869-5450 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

A prominent media topic in the UK in the early 2020s is the energy crisis affecting the UK and most of Europe. It brings into a single public debate issues of energy dependency and sustainability, fair distribution of economic burdens and cost of living, as well as climate change, risk, and sustainability. In this paper, we investigate the public discourse around the energy crisis and cost of living to identify how these pivotal and contradictory issues are reconciled in this debate and to identify which social actors are involved and the role they play. We analyse a document corpus retrieved from UK newspapers from January 2014 to March 2023. We apply a variety of natural language processing and data visualisation techniques to identify key topics, novel trends, critical social actors, and the role they play in the debate, along with the sentiment associated with those actors and topics. We combine automated techniques with manual discourse analysis to explore and validate the insights revealed in this study. The findings verify the utility of these techniques by providing a flexible and scalable pipeline for discourse analysis and providing critical insights for cost of living – energy crisis nexus research.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-024-01233-w
Additional Information:	We gratefully acknowledge the fnancial support from the Strategic Research Fund of Goldsmiths, University of London.
Keywords:	energy crisis, climate change, media, discourse, NLP
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Computing
Dates:	Date Event 24 February 2024 Accepted 29 March 2024 Published Online 2024 Published
Item ID:	35209
Date Deposited:	07 Mar 2024 12:19
Last Modified:	11 Apr 2024 16:17
Peer Reviewed:	Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/35209

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