Paper Info
Title
The Geopolitical Web: Assessing societal risk in an uncertain world
Abstract
Country risk - the likelihood that a state will weaken or fail - and the methods of assessing it continue to be of serious concern to the international community. Country risk has traditionally been assessed by monitoring economic and financial indicators. However, social media (such as forums, blogs, and websites) are now important transporters of citizens' daily conversations and opinions, and as such may carry discernible indicators of risk, but they have been as yet little-used for this task. The Geopolitical Web project is a research effort with the ultimate goal of developing computational approaches for monitoring public opinion in regions of conflict, assessing country risk indicators in the social media of fragile or weakening states, and correlating these risk signals with commonly accepted quantitative geopolitical risk assessments. This paper presents the initial motivation for this data-driven project, collection procedures adopted, preliminary results of an automated topical analysis of the collection's content, and expected future work. By catching and deciphering possible signals of country risk in social discourse we hope to offer the international community an additional means of assessing the need for intervention in or support for fragile or weakening states.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1109/ISI.2011.5984051
ISI
Keywords
Field
DocType
politics,uncertain world,forums,international community,web forums,news websites,risk signals,international security,websites,soft power,blogs,economic monitoring,geopolitical risk assessments,social media,web sites,internet,financial indicators,geopolitical web,stability,web mining,societal risk,data driven project,heart,public opinion,risk assessment,indexation,indexes,terrorism,business
Data mining,Social media,Computer security,Computer science,Terrorism,Country risk,Risk assessment,International security,International community,Public opinion,Soft power
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4577-0082-8
1
0.49
References 
Authors
4
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hsinchun Chen19569813.33
Catherine A. Larson27710.45
Theodore Elhourani3564.83
David Zimbra42019.93
David Ware510.83