Understanding the early formation of attitudes towards emerging technologies, such as quantum science & technology (QS&T), is essential for aligning the effect of science communication in...Show moreUnderstanding the early formation of attitudes towards emerging technologies, such as quantum science & technology (QS&T), is essential for aligning the effect of science communication in practice with its intentions. This study explores the application of natural language processing (NLP) techniques to investigate the influence of news articles on social media comments regarding QS&T. We curated a dataset of 217 articles and 14, 391 top-level comments from Reddit. Employing GPT-4, a semi-automated annotation method was developed to label comments for sentiment and engagement towards QS&T, achieving a Cohen’s kappa of 0.82 when pooling over multiple labelling repetitions and comparing with human annotations. We then used support-vector regression to determine if news article embeddings could be used to predict comment sentiment and engagement. After experimenting with various embedding strategies, including Sentence-BERT and RoBERTa models, no significant correlations were found between article content and comment sentiment or engagement towards QS&T. Further interdisciplinary work in empirical communication research and NLP is suggested to explore alternative representations for news articles and their ability to predict perceptions in news comments.Show less
Indigenous women environmental human rights defenders are essential for protecting and preserving nature on earth. However, the lethal violence against them is a substantial problem in Latin...Show moreIndigenous women environmental human rights defenders are essential for protecting and preserving nature on earth. However, the lethal violence against them is a substantial problem in Latin America. Nevertheless, there is almost no media coverage of the atrocities happening there. The murder of Berta Cáceres in Honduras is one of the first cases to receive substantial international media attention. This thesis argues that the international media intended to influence the Honduran government to start an investigation into the murder of Berta Cáceres and prosecute her assailants for achieving justice.Show less
