Studying International Human Rights Information Landscape by a Big Data Approach

• In Event: Poster Session: New Avenues in Human Rights Research & South Asian Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: New Avenues in Human Rights Research

Abstract

A Sour Friendship? A big data approach in studying the information landscape of international human rights advocacy

Do advocacy efforts for different human rights issues compete against each other? In this research, I categorize human rights concerns into three topics: physical integrity rights, political rights, and socio-economic rights. Conceptually and empirically, the three human rights categories suggest different urgency and visibility levels of the violations in the eyes of domestic and international audiences. Conventionally, transnational human rights actors, including human rights scholars, are more concerned with the first two types of rights. As attention on socioeconomic human rights issues grows, does this imply that people's focus shifts away from physical integrity rights and political rights?

In this paper, I utilize a novel large-scale dataset including the news reports from eight major English media outlets as well as the Google trend data on people’s search records of relevant human rights topics spanning the last decade to explore the potential tension among campaigns addressing different subjects in transnational human rights advocacy. These two data sources provide a comprehensive view of the information landscape within international human rights advocacy, encompassing both the aspects of information provision and demand. The primary empirical results suggest the existence of long-lasting competition among different human rights topics for media attention and people’s concerns.

Author

• Jie Lian