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Developing Situational Awareness from Blogosphere: An Australian Case Study

Authors:
Mainuddin Shaik
Muhammad Nihal Hussain
Zachary Stine
Nitin Agarwal

Keywords: COVID-19; Australia; China; trade war; election; South China Sea; Indo pacific; influence.

Abstract:
Analyzing topics of interest from online discourse can be challenging. One well-known approach is to conduct topic modeling to study the topics of interest. In this paper, we use a multi-method analytical framework to analyze topics in addition to characterizing their influence. We analyze 20,066 blog posts and 10,113 comments from July 2019 through December 2020 that deal with diplomacy, defense, trade, and election related topics surrounding Australia and China. Our results show that COVID-19 discourse absorbs much of the attention of bloggers during the time period considered, even though no COVID-related keywords were incorporated in the data collection. Our findings suggest that a topic can be influential even when it is not trending and vice-versa. It also showed that Australian bloggers were dominant and discussed the topics of interest compared to Russian and US bloggers. The Australian blogosphere simultaneously discussed climate change along with defense related topics, and they prefer to give attention to long-term topics over short-term topics. Finally, popular election topics in Australian blogosphere tend to have a more analytical tone in the text

Pages: 14 to 20

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2021

Publication date: October 3, 2021

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2326-9294

ISBN: 978-1-61208-899-0

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from October 3, 2021 to October 7, 2021