Sociology Seminar 
Time: 12:00 pm – 13:30 pm
Date: 16th of april
Room : 3049

Mariana DE BRITO  (Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research) – “Whose pain counts? A computational text analysis of inequalities in disaster and adaptation reporting”

Abstract : 

In this talk, I show how natural language processing and large language models can be used to detect inequalities in how climate disasters are studied and reported. I focus on systematic biases in what is documented, how events are framed, and whose experiences are made visible. I present two complementary approaches. First, using machine learning to screen over 500,000 peer-reviewed articles, I map global patterns in the scientific literature on the socioeconomic impacts of climate hazards and show where research attention is unevenly distributed. For example, disasters in low-income countries must cause up to 16 times more fatalities and affect 130 times more people to receive comparable scientific attention. Second, drawing on a corpus of 250,000 German news articles, I examine international disaster reporting to uncover structural patterns in which disaster events receive media attention relative to who is affected and where the disaster occurs. Together, these results show how computational text analysis can reveal biases in knowledge production and collective attention, raising critical questions about whose pain counts in the era of escalating climate crisis.

Zoom link : https://zoom.us/j/96901165530?pwd=I0MWEK6eOKKhqys6s7RY4Rc4CbX64a.1

Organizers:
Paola TUBARO (Pôle sociologie CREST)

Nicolas JULIA (Pôle sociologie CREST)

Patrick PRÄG (Pôle sociologie CREST)

Sponsors:
CREST