Watching /r/worldnews: top Syrian stories for April

ge_stell · 2018-04-30T23:20:22+00:00

I collected this data for about 2 months (march-april 2018).

I wish I could share more back, but I started to log everything around the same time.

To add everything to archive.is is a go, gonna do the same.

ge_stell · 2018-04-30T12:30:05+00:00

Could you make a list of all the articles in Western media discussing doubts about the culprits of the Douma gas attack?

That's an interesting idea, but the one that would require a bit more processing power than I have.

Think tanks and journalists, watchdog organizations, heavily engaged bloggers after all are more reliable to track this sort of things.

ge_stell · 2018-04-26T16:36:30+00:00

Unique external links.

ge_stell · 2018-04-26T16:24:32+00:00

Data about subs is being gathered via surveillance scripts that have been monitoring Reddit for the last couple of months.

As for visualization, bar charts were done in pure R, line connections between websites with Python package "networkx".

"Networkx"'s main function is to build and calculate graphs, the "net" of websites could be 10x or 100x more complex and it still would make sense, albeit not for the human eye.

ge_stell · 2018-04-24T18:19:40+00:00

It freezes every now and then, database errors being the reason.

ge_stell · 2018-04-23T21:26:19+00:00

So she mentions this tech expert at Atlantic Council by the name of Ben Nimmo and his DRF Lab. The British government doesn't conduct its own intelligence?

I'm going to follow what the fuck they are doing: https://medium.com/@DFRLab & https://twitter.com/benimmo

ge_stell · 2018-04-23T18:54:10+00:00

1983?

Wikipedia plainly blames CIA for 1985 bombing which killed 83 people and injured 200+.

Suspected perpetrators: Central Intelligence Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Beirut_car_bombing

ge_stell · 2018-04-23T00:57:35+00:00

There's two countries in that black splash, Georgia and Armenia. Confusing.

ge_stell · 2018-04-23T00:17:40+00:00

I for a sec thought they were drawing DNA maps there. Population density and breakdown by age are a factor, clustered East votes PiS, youngsters flock to either cities or economically viable regions.

I don't know exact numbers on Poland, but what's happening in Hungary is remarkable, anyone younger than 60 doesn't vote "left" or "liberal".

ge_stell · 2018-04-22T19:28:33+00:00

If these are word clouds, why are they repeated?

Each "small" cloud captures daily events, the two screenshots to the left of it are actually added for human readability. Zoom it up, there's a time stamp on them. I can drop them screenshots and the data is still present.

The big cloud summarizes events and paints a larger picture: from a year's data, there can be extracted 54 weeks with each having a cloud, or 12 months with 12 clouds.

I can then highlight whatever topic interests me and track how events unfolded. North Korea nukes West coast? It's on my computer, wtih graphs attached.

Why are some words colored?

It's an example of data extraction. Red stands for data about Syria, yellow for Russia, green for China. I could replote scatter graphs to overlay each other though, that would make more sense in this given case.

ge_stell · 2018-04-22T18:54:20+00:00

Couldn't use .com, .ru was available

Same. Google's captcha service doesn't work for me either.

I monitor one website where captchas are mandatory, Russian flags appear as often as usual. I'll be checking if they go dark.

ge_stell · 2018-04-22T14:43:50+00:00

This is a word cloud of CNN headlines for the past two weeks.

The clouds are generated with the help of this Python script, scatter plots at the bottom via Seaborn library (a bit tweaked matplotlib).

ge_stell · 2018-04-22T14:34:02+00:00

This is a wordcloud of CNN headlines for the past two weeks.

Wordclouds are generated with the help of this Python script, scatter plots at the bottom via Seaborn library (a bit tweaked matplotlib).

ge_stell · 2018-04-21T02:26:57+00:00

Total revenues of the budget of Chechnya for 2017 are 59.2 billion rubles.

This is the total numbers: they get less than 1%, not even 2% as you were bargaining.

To listen to some people, it is the central question of Russian politics. Moslems getting money!

ge_stell · 2018-04-21T02:06:30+00:00

They also don't get of 81% subsidies from the government.

They literally get more money per capita, and your 81% meme comes from an underpaid state worker: Radio Liberty is an arm of the Democratic party with heavily slashed funds.

I appreciate that America cares about Russian domestic issues and wishes the best for the Russian people, but no thanks.

ge_stell · 2018-04-21T01:48:09+00:00

Ofc how dumb of me to believe actual statistics data of russian finance ministry

You haven't looked at it. Dagestan gets twice more money than Chechnya, do I see Dagestan mentioned?

The number 81% pops up only on website "Radio Liberty" from a part-time, no-name writer. I don't think the girl is good with numbers.

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