Conservation culturomes: metrics of evolution of public interest

Abstract

As demonstrated over time from the Environmental Sciences, it is absolutely essential to study the relationship between social, political and economic development regarding the formation and transformation of human attitudes and priorities. Hence, monitoring trends in public interest is extremely important for the proper planning and implementation of environmental policy. A newly emerging science which combines biodiversity with human cultural and social diversity through the analysis of changes in words or phrases frequencies in vast digital databases in the World Wide Web, reflecting the fluctuations of public interest, is called "Culturomics". This Thesis investigates the trends in public interest in main environmental terms and concepts, in particular, regarding biodiversity conservation, as they arise from Google Trends and the determinants that they affect to them, through four case studies. The goal is to capture the evolution of public interest comparing the data of three earlier published scientific metrics to recent metrics, defining some ephemerality indicators. In addition, a new metric using a wide collection of terms of the modern environmental lexicography was carried out also, in order to assess the contemporary environmental discourse impact to the public. Simple operations i.e. curve fitting, geometric distances and size (distance)/rank distributions on the arrangement of sets of terms inand between- different metrics are performed in order to uncover the systematic evolution of “Culturomes”.