We use Twitter data for several projects on public perception. Most importantly, as presented in our chapter on perceptions carbon dioxide removal in the State of CDR, our goal is to develop methodologically sound methods to track and explain changes in the attention, sentiment, and emotions towards emerging climate technologies. Doing so with the help of publicly available data allows us to perform the analyses in near-real-time and on historical data. This approach complements studies in the social sciences that are based on focus groups and (large-scale) surveys and hence require longer update-intervals.
In order to process large amounts of data, we utilise two-dimensional semantic landscapes of embedded texts, state-of-the-art pre-trained classifiers, and embedding-based topic models.
So far, we have worked on, or have been involved in projects on
- Geoengineering on Twitter
- Greenhouse gas removal
- Chapter 4 in The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal (2023)
- Attention, sentiments and emotions towards emerging climate technologies on Twitter (2023)
- Chapter 6 in The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal (2024)
- Growing online attention and positive sentiments towards carbon dioxide removal (2024, in revision)
- Climate change discourse
- Workshops
- We participated in the Using Social Media Data and Digital Platforms in Climate and Sustainability Research, scheduled for 28-29 October 2024 at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria.
- We participated in the Environmental data humanities hackathon in June 2023, organised by the Digital Humanities Network Potsdam.
