A Global Big Data Assessment of Public Attitudes Towards CCS Through the Media

Popular opinion plays a critical enabling role in scientific endeavor, influencing the legislation and availability of funding that enables basic research. Yet, while much of science's innovation occurs in controlled laboratory environments away from public view, CCS research, by virtue of its scale, operates largely in the public sphere, making popular perception uniquely critical to its success. This study draws from a cross-section of historical and contemporary media databases to trace the discourse of CCS across the print, broadcast, and web realms, from newspapers to books, television to imagery, web news to web searches, providing one of the first cross-media explorations of the portrayal of the field. Finally, a novel data mining approach is used to extract and characterize the quarter-million people, 140,000 organizations, and 50,000 locations mentioned across the more than 32,000 websites that have discussed CCS over the past five years, constructing a completely automated network diagram that synthesizes the natural “communities” of conversation around CCS, identifying key influencers and the people with whom they are most closely connected