How can we measure the growth in interest in climate change? It seems like lately television is awash in big corporate advertisements claiming to make contributions to climate change prevention. The number of websites, blogs, and media reports on climate change and its impact seems to grow daily. But how can we measure this? How can we know how much interest has changed between 2008 and 2009? Or, over the past ten or twenty years?
One way of measuring interest is to sign up with Morningside Analytics, the brainchild of John Kelly. Kelly’s company will map the social networks of particular interest groups, and keep track of how these change, grow, or shrink.
The Berkman Center for Internet and Society has partnered with Thomson Reuters to offer Media Cloud as a free service that does much the same thing.
Both services track only current presence of an issue in new media. The past is past and must be gotten at in other ways. Nonetheless, these services offer powerful tools for a study like Culture of Climate Change, which will be able to track new media presence and networking around climate change issues over the duration of its study.
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