As Donald Trump’s naming of the ‘Gulf of America’ (ahem… Gulf of Mexico!) shows, the naming of geographical areas on land or sea can be highly contested.
One of Adrian’s Postdoctoral research projects, led by Professor Humphrey Southall at the University of Portsmouth, assisted by Dr Paula Aucott, examined contested geographical naming.
The research used multiple modes, including:
- Monitoring interactions on Twitter and Facebook Online Social Networks (OSNs) sampled and collected over time.
- Web-scraping of websites ‘in-country’ and ‘out-of-country’ using NordVPN and custom-built Python scripts.
- Physical examination of corpora held in copyright libraries around the world.
While Humphrey and Paula got to travel, Adrian collected several hundred thousand OSN records using George Washington University’s excellent Social Feed Manager and wrote code in Python and Bash to programmatically control NordVPN from an Ubuntu virtual machine using openpyn.
Lists of websites, or specific URLs, could then be captured virtually from over 100 countries. Pages were scraped using selenium with text and images saved to a PostgreSQL database. Non-English text was translated using Google’s Translate API.
This research project was conducted confidentially so no publications have been produced. However, together with the physical visits, a trawl of online material produced several interesting results.