14. Mapping Topics in International Climate Negotiations: A Computer-Assisted Semantic Network Approach

Baya-Laffite and Cointet map the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations topic structure and evolution over 20 years using a digital corpus from the most renowned internal journal of the negotiations available online, the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB). The authors’ methodological strategy combines text mining, network analysis and data visualization tools. The chapter shows how this mixed-method strategy applied to a digital corpus drawn from the ENB website, makes it possible to map climate change negotiations. Mixing traditional research methods and computer-assisted techniques, as well as manual and automated operations results in a series of unique new visual syntheses of the UNFCCC process. Narrating the visualizations allows distant readings of topics’ semantic structure and topic trajectories and thereby to test the robustness of the maps as well as the tools and methods used to produce them.