Drought Awareness: Exploring the forms of partnerships in the process of publicizing drought in the media

Résumé En

This poster explores drought awareness partnerships, delving into policies, sociotechnical choices, and stakeholder perspectives in Arizona. Our interdisciplinary approach integrates communication and media studies, environmental geography, and textual corpus analysis to scrutinize media reporting on drought issues.The analysis delves into the dynamics of visibility-invisibility processes, and is conducted in five steps: 1) Conducting an empirical field survey; 2) Building a network of stakeholders (relationships, strategies, initiatives); 3) Analyzing the media coverage of current events (press); 4) Analyzing the communication of stakeholders on digital media (Twitter); 5) Interpretive synthesis on the visibility-invisibility of observed data and partnerships between stakeholders as notable through the media. This mix-method combines qualitative methods (case studies in social sciences and discourse analysis) with unsupervised learning by Probabilistic Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Topic Modeling-LDA), NLP tools, and snowball sampling. Visual representations are used as a heuristic method to analyze data. The research aims to understand and improve partnerships between water stakeholders for publicizing drought through media channels, emphasizing visibility and invisibility dynamics within the local context of Southern and Central Arizona.