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natemiller

Climate Change Topic Modelling

After obtaining articles from the New York Times that included the phrases 'climate change' and 'global warming' between 1988 - 2016, Dynamic Topic Modeling was applied to search for shifts in the discussion of climate change over time. Analyses were performed using the Python package 'gensim', which provides a wrapper for a C+ based program based on that originally developed by David Blei (https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/models/wrappers/dtmmodel.html). A total of 8 coherent topics were identified and labled. The top 10 words from each year were then identified and used to generate streamplots using d3.js.

Streamplots aren't the perfect visualization, but they do provide a useful means of assessing the general importance of particular words within each topic and how the use of those words, within that topic, and within the broader umbrella of "Climate Change' has shifted over time.