The creation of the climategate hype in blogs and newspapers: mixed methods approach

Purpose – Research into the emergence of a hype requires a mixed methods approach that takes into account both the evolution over time and mutual influences across different types of media. The purpose of this paper is to present a methodological approach to detect an emerging hype in online communications. Design/methodology/approach – The paper combines Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) time series modelling and semantic co-word networks, and this combination of methods provides a view on the emergence and development of a hype at the level of mutual influences across a heterogeneous set of newspaper and blog data. The subject scope of the paper is the climategate hype. The climategate hype was triggered by the online publication of a set of hacked e-mails belonging to climate researchers at the East Anglia University in November 2009. Findings – The main findings show that the climategate hype was initiated in the blogs, and the newspapers were reacting to the blogs. At the level of sem...