Conceptual Mapping of Controversies

TL;DR

This paper presents a qualitative method using Formal Concept Analysis and economics of conventions to create controversy maps from online news media, helping assess diversity, complexity, and bias in debates.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining Formal Concept Analysis and ordinal data science to analyze controversies in online news media.

Findings

Controversy maps reveal diversity and complexity of debates.

Method can identify potential biases in news coverage.

Concept lattices facilitate navigation between articles.

Abstract

With our work, we contribute towards a qualitative analysis of the discourse on controversies in online news media. For this, we employ Formal Concept Analysis and the economics of conventions to derive conceptual controversy maps. In our experiments, we analyze two maps from different news journals with methods from ordinal data science. We show how these methods can be used to assess the diversity, complexity and potential bias of controversies. In addition to that, we discuss how the diagrams of concept lattices can be used to navigate between news articles.