Global Pulse is very pleased today to officially announce a partnership with Quid – an information-mapping platform that enables visual mapping and analysis on any topic.
Quid is partnering with us to provide access to its platform to enable our data scientists in Pulse Labs New York, Jakarta and Kampala to analyze large text-based data sets, such as media content, by identifying key-words and trends related to global development and humanitarian issues, ranging from early warning of disease outbreaks to perceptions about unemployment and food security.
Global Pulse and Quid have already been collaborating to understand immunization awareness and sentiment through analysis of news content, and will next work to analyze media and public sentiment around issues related to biofuels, energy efficiency and climate action.
This week, during a special Summit at UN Headquarters, world leaders adopted an ambitious new agenda for called the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Quid and Global Pulse set out to utilize the platform to do a preliminary analysis to assess the media coverage surrounding the SDG Summit.
With so much media attention, it is difficult to fully capture all coverage in context, it is, therefore, necessary to use machine intelligence to read through all content to find patterns in this information. Quid is built to comprehend large amounts of information on any given topic and to find narrative patterns across large volumes of text. We were curious about the conversations surrounding the Sustainable Development Goal Summit in NY, and what points on the agenda were capturing the public’s imagination, what the press deemed share-worthy, and how the conversation was shaping.
The analysis filtered through English-language news articles for keywords including “Sustainable Development Goal” AND “Summit” OR “SDGs” AND “Summit” OR “Data Revolution” AND “SDGs” between June 30, 2015, and now, to try and find patterns within the themes or narratives in the media coverage.
The agenda and lessons learned from the MDG’s dominated the storyline. In addition, India and China’s leaders attracted a large amount of media coverage in relation to the Summit.
Of course, among the 17 new SDGs is an emphasis on data, innovation and public-private partnership, so we wanted to dig in further to see how much traction the theme of “data revolution” took hold within the media coverage. The analysis shows that a third of the articles related to the SDG Summit mentioned data. While still a peripheral topic, it is blossoming and gaining a foothold.
A quick legend on how to read the network visualization maps is included below:
More analysis will be done around the SDG Summit and the narratives around the new Global Goals in the weeks ahead. We welcome your ideas and inputs as we dig deeper into the data!
