Crisis talk: analysis of the public debate around the energy crisis and cost of living
It provides a scalable pipeline for discourse analysis, offering insights for researchers studying the energy-cost of living nexus, but is incremental in applying existing methods to new data.
The paper analyzed UK newspaper discourse from 2014-2023 to understand how the energy crisis and cost of living are reconciled, identifying key topics, social actors, and sentiments using NLP and visualization techniques.
A prominent media topic in the UK in the early 2020s is the energy crisis affecting the UK and most of Europe. It brings into a single public debate issues of energy dependency and sustainability, fair distribution of economic burdens and cost of living, as well as climate change, risk, and sustainability. In this paper, we investigate the public discourse around the energy crisis and cost of living to identify how these pivotal and contradictory issues are reconciled in this debate and to identify which social actors are involved and the role they play. We analyse a document corpus retrieved from UK newspapers from January 2014 to March 2023. We apply a variety of natural language processing and data visualisation techniques to identify key topics, novel trends, critical social actors, and the role they play in the debate, along with the sentiment associated with those actors and topics. We combine automated techniques with manual discourse analysis to explore and validate the insights revealed in this study. The findings verify the utility of these techniques by providing a flexible and scalable pipeline for discourse analysis and providing critical insights for cost of living - energy crisis nexus research.