MAKING CLIMATE CHANGE VISIBLE: GOOGLE

Group members:

Elaine Rabello, Laura Drakopulos

Questions

What does the query “climate change” return on Google Images?

Methods

Based on the idea that the top ranked images for this query could vary across the countries (and local Google pages), we did a convenience sample based on the languages in the group and, then, selected 12 countries based on their protagonism or participation on this matter.

Countries chosen / Language Spoken / Query / Local domain

• UK / English / “climate change” / www.google.co.uk

• India / English / “climate change” / www.google.co.in

• Australia / English / “climate change” / www.google.com.au

• Italy / Italian / “cambiamento climatico” / www.google.co.it

• Spain / Spanish / “cambio climático” / www.google.es

• Mexico / Spanish / “cambio climático” / www.google.mx

• Brasil / Portuguese / “mudança climática” / www.google.com.br

• Portugal / Portuguese / “mudança climática” / www.google.pt

• The Netherlands / Dutch / “klimaatverandering” / www.google.nl

• Germany / German / “klimawandel” / www.google.de

• France / French / “changement climatique” / www.google.fr

Images were scraped on these domains, with aforementioned queries, using Google’s Rank Page, and DownThemAll Firefox extension for a batch download. These were the results.

After noticing that DownThemAll was not maintaining the rank of the scraped images and other relevant metadata, we proceeded to a manual download of the top 10 images for each country domain and the manual entry of metadata in a spreadsheet organised by country (url of the image, url of the page, author/source, date, title, caption, comments).

Looking at the metadata and the images themselves, we noticed that many scraped images were repeated within language group countries. It suggested that, more than the country and local domain, the language was the key factor to understand the specificities of the results of each query search. We reorganised the photos by language, eliminating the repetitions amongst countries with the same language.

Afterwards, we uploaded and renamed the files to Google Drive, split by language, ending up with 70 images (top 10 of each language) to run the content analysis.

Findings

Within the top 10 image results returned by Google for the search term ‘climate change’ there was consistency between country pages within language groups, with some variation between language groups. For example, the top 10 images were the same amongst all English language countries sampled, though sometimes ranked differently within the 10. Images varied between language groups, although some themes remained consistent across all countries and languages.

Overwhelming images were photographs with almost no infographics or maps. Photos tended to be of landscapes and/or depicting weather events. For example, a common image across languages was a digitally edited photograph of a parched earth desert landscape foregrounded transitioning to greenscape that fades to a city skyline in the background greenscape in background. Pictures of ice and water most common in German and English language pages. Plants were featured in all images but less frequently in German and Dutch image results. Images of planet Earth as a global scale were not common, and those that were present were found mostly in Spanish language searches.

Humans were conspicuously absent from almost all images and polar bears were the only non-human animals featured. Italian (Italy), Dutch (the Netherlands) and German (Germany) were the only language searches to include polar bear images, and of these the animal was most common in German, making up half of the top 10 images sampled. Images depicting behaviors related to climate change focused on causes rather than solutions (i.e. polluting industries or urban environments not conservation practices).

Of particular interest is that no scientists, scientific or government agencies were represented in the images (with the exception of two in Spain out of a total sample of 70). This was surprising given that many of the images live on government or NGO websites or scientific.

-- NataliaSanchez - 17 Jul 2017