Content Analysis of Covid-19 and Agriculture News in Bangladesh Using Topic Modeling Algorithm

Main Article Content

M Moriom Khatun*
Md Saeed Siddik
Md Abdur Rahman
Shah Khaled

Abstract

Covid-19 pandemic is an ongoing global crisis which affects all the economic sectors including the most fundamental sector, agriculture. Bangladesh, a developing country and is home to 2.11% of the world's population, is facing a massive shock in the agricultural sector which is the backbone of the country's economy. In the era of technology and having lockdown in recent pandemic, every person willingly collects information on agriculture and rural economics from publicly available online news articles. To satisfy the readers' demand, not only the online blogs and newspapers, but also printed newspapers have taken a serious look at open access articles. This research analyzed entire online articles related to Covid-19 and Bangladesh agriculture news published during this country wide lockdown after the first case was addressed. Topic modeling algorithm has been used to determine the underlying topics over these textual contents for mitigating the gap between media coverage and actual scenario. This research considered the entire set of English online articles indexed by the most prominent Google search engine to point out diverse topics which are covered by various news sources. The dataset and experimental results were statistically analyzed to define the relationship and significance among different independent variables. Numerous interesting findings have been reported in this research including the fearsome number of female agricultural reporters, high frequency topic of agricultural economics and government spokesman, significance between underlying topics and article sources, etc. It concludes with recommendations to bridge the gap between government policy and actual scenario presented by news sources on Bangladeshi agricultural sector during Covid-19.


 


Keywords: Covid-19; agriculture news; content analysis; topic modeling; clustering algorithm


*Corresponding author: Email: moriom@sau.edu.bd


                                       Tel: +8801520083662

Article Details

Section
Original Research Articles

References

Goddard, E., 2020. The impact of COVID‐19 on food retail and food service in Canada: Preliminary assessment. Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics, https://dx.doi.org/ 10.1111/cjag.12243

Kerr, W.A., 2020. The COVID‐19 pandemic and agriculture: Short- and long-run implications for international trade relations. Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics, https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cjag.12230

Irvine, M. 2020. How COVID-19 Is Shaping Google Search Trends & Patterns. [Online] Available at: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2020/03/30/covid-19-google-search trends

Bangkok Post, 2020. Sixty Australian Newspapers to Stop Printing. [Online] Available at: https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/1890915/sixty-australian-newspapers-to-stop-printing

Narayana, U. and Kumar, S. 2009. Content analysis of agricultural news coverage in leading language dailies of India-A study of Kannada language dailies of Karnataka State. University Journal of Communication, 3(1), 1-14.

Chandelier, M., Steuckardt, A., Mathevet, R., Diwersy, S. and Gimenez, O., 2018. Content analysis of newspaper coverage of wolf recolonization in France using structural topic modeling. Biological Conservation, 220(1), 254-261.

Ghosh, D. and Guha, R., 2013. What are we ‘tweeting’ about obesity? Mapping tweets with topic modeling and Geographic Information System. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 40(2), 90-102.

Bhatia, S., Athreya, V., Grenyer, R. and Macdonald, D.W., 2013. Understanding the role of representations of human-leopard conflict in Mumbai through media‐content analysis. Conservation Biology, 27(3), 588-594.

Miah, M.D., Kabir, M.H., Koike, M. and Akther, S., 2011. Major climate-change issues covered by the daily newspapers of Bangladesh. The Environmentalist, 31(1), 67-73.

Hart, C.E., Hayes, D.J., Jacobs, K.L., Schulz, L.L. and Crespi, J.M., 2020. The Impact of COVID-19 on Iowa’s Corn, Soybean, Ethanol, Pork, and Beef Sectors. [online] Available at: https://www.card.iastate.edu/products/policy-briefs/display/?n=1301

Ogessa, C.M. and Sife, A.S., 2017. Newspaper coverage of agricultural information in Tanzania. University of Dar es Salaam Library Journal, 12(1), 12-26.

Okorie, N. and Oyedepo, T., 2011. Newspaper reportage and its effect towards promoting agricultural development in Nigeria. Journal of Media and Communication Studies, 3(2), 27-32.

Ahn, R.J., Nelson, M.R. and Ferguson, G.M., 2020. Local and standardized strategies: A content analysis of newspaper food and beverage advertising in Jamaica. Newspaper Research Journal, 41(2), 179-203.

Keller, T.R., Hase, V., Thaker, J., Mahl, D. and Schäfer, M.S., 2020. News media coverage of climate change in India 1997-2016: Using automated content analysis to assess themes and topics. Environmental Communication, 14(2), 219-235.

Chen, H., Huang, X. and Li, Z., 2020. A content analysis of Chinese news coverage on COVID-19 and tourism. Current Issues in Tourism, https://doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2020. 1763269

Stat Counter Global Stats, 2020.Search Engine Market Share Worldwide. [Online] Available at: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

Wallach, H.M., 2006. Topic modeling: beyond bag-of-words, Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Machine Learning, New York, United States, 2006, pp. 977-984.

Blei, D.M., Ng, A.Y. and Jordan, M.I., 2003. Latent dirichlet allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3(1), 993-1022.

Manning, C.D., Raghavan, P. and Schütze, H., 2009. An Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Jones, K.S., 1972. A statistical interpretation of term specificity and its application in retrieval, Journal of Documentation, 28(1), 11-21.