Posted: October 2023, revised September 2026
Contact: Tim Repke
What images do different media outlets choose for their content on climate change or different CDR methods? Looking at cover images in news platforms or attachments in Tweets (or other social media), run object detection on those and maybe some “mood” measures to compare common themes. Are there common visual metaphors (e.g. natural solutions always with rainforest, other things with smoke stacks or clouds)? Useful skills: basic programming to retrieve and manage data and apply image classification
With the shift of social media platforms, it might be worth considering other alternatives, such as newspaper archives (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/search?lang=en&query=climate%20change&sort=oldest). Maybe not all articles have a featuring image, so we could also look into semantic/topical shifts over longer time frames. Probably from melting ice caps and sea level rise to green energy, wildfires, and heat waves.
