Cultures of Crisis

Project members: Douglas Allen, Ali Honari, Bo Mai, Sara Minucci, Marta Severo, Michael Stevenson, Wojciech Walczak

The term crisis refers to a "vitally important or decisive stage in the progress of anything; a turning-point" (OED). It can span different spatial and temporal scales - from environmental to personal crisis, from a crisis in the home to one of the global economy. This flexibility means the term can easily lead to debate, for instance around the question of interests (what gets defined as crisis, and "whose crisis" is it?). But this flexibility also means crisis is a kind of empty container, one that can be differently charged in various contexts (see Marres and Weltevrede, 2012). Can the term "crisis," like the generic term "rights," be used to query (national) cultural specificity?

Research Question

How is crisis characaterized by different national media cultures?

Corpus and Method

Query

Input Term: Crisis [UK, US], Crise [FR], Crisi [IT], Krise [DK], أزمة [EG], kryzys [PO], [CH]

Language (is actually iTunes stroes: the respective country

Media type: Podcast

Entity: Podcast

Genre/Category: All

Total number of "crisis podcasts" per country:

iTunes API

Amazon API

Data extraction for primary categories:

A single row for a podcast in the CSV file:

04539f8d7a77cb2f9c93a9476ea5bf5e,podcast,,,,http://itunes.apple.com/it/artist/italian-podcast-network/id475299591?mt=2&uo=4,http://a4.mzstatic.com/us/r30/Podcasts/33/86/ed/ps.mmcjycld.60x60-50.jpg,,,,475299591,"Barbara Favaro",,,,"1401 - 26 - 1301 - 1310 - 1323",2012-03-08T06:25:00Z,,EUR,"Letteratura - Podcast - Arte - Musica - Giochi e hobby - Literature",,465720029,Ku-B-Kolo33,Literature,,,track,KuBKolo33,http://itunes.apple.com/it/podcast/ku-b-kolo33/id465720029?mt=2&uo=4,,http://a4.mzstatic.com/us/r30/Podcasts/33/86/ed/ps.mmcjycld.100x100-75.jpg,,,,,,,Ku-B-Kolo33,,

Number of "crisis podcasts" per category per country:

Wordles of Crisis: Religion and Spirituality in Egypt, US and UK.

Wordle of Crisis Podcasts in Egypt:

Wordle of Crisis Podcasts in UK:

Difference and Repetition

Unshared Categories

*Diagram of similar countries and (primary) categories*

Crisis on the Runway: Italy (& France)

• Centrality of Culture & Society and News & Politics
• Presence of Beauty and Fashion
• Marginalized position of Business and Economy

Zooming in on Category Co-occurence

The analyses below show the cross-country patterns of subject co-occurrence in podcasts. The size of the nodes show the total number of podcasts with each subject title, while the weight of the links indicates the frequency with which those terms appear in the same podcast. The Gephi visualizations have been partitioned according to modularity.

Egypt

United Kingdom

The "USA" charts below show the ability (when viewing the graph in Gephi) to mouse-over a node and see the nodes to which it connects and the thickness of those connections.

USA 1

USA 2

USA 3

Future research (Amazon and the Best Sellers' Crisis)

US Book Titles (by sales rank)

• Itunes Store Scraper: