From Debates to Actors I: Who makes what statements on the web?
Overview of Meta-Actor’s Informing the E-waste Debate
Each source document URL was categorized into one of seven meta-actors including: Business, Government, Journalism, Not-for-Profit, QUANGO (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations), Scientific Community, and Other. A total count of all source document URLs reveals that Journalism (23%), Scientific Community (20%), and Business (19.9%) represent the three most common meta-actors informing the e-waste debate, followed by Not-for-Profit (14%), Government (10%), QUANGOS (7%), and Other (6%).
The individual actors identified in the corpus (i.e., specific people representing various types of meta-actors) were also organized into the same seven meta-actor categories. This analysis reveals that actors characterized as Scientific Community (26.7%), Business (21.3%), and Government (20%) were most active in the corpus, followed by Not-for-Profit (15%), Journalism (7.9%), QUANGOS (5.8%), and Other (3.3%).