Informational relation between countries
Understanding the evolving relationship between identified countries using Connexun’s news api
Mutual mentions by press agencies and media outlets of two distinct countries can be a relevant KPI to understand the evolving relationship between two identified countries. Mutual mentions can be employed to, first and foremost, keep track of the most relevant emergencies/frictions between countries under scrutiny, weigh the relevance of such emergencies and perhaps also assess and estimate the frequency at which crises have emerged over time. Connexun’s crawling and classifying technology enables us to point out and visualize such findings in a clear manner.
In the graph below we have scrutinized US and Mexican news from Monday the 12th of December 2016 to Monday the 8th of March 2017. In order to conduct the following analysis we have employed historical collected and processed text data published throughout a very peculiar timeframe for the two countries. The analysis is derived from clustered data consisting of over 60.000 daily international news articles in 15+ different languages aggregated daily by Connexun.
We introduce intercountry distance as a multiplicative inverse of the geometrical mean d = (p₁₂·p₂₁)⁻¹/², where p₁₂ is part of international news of country 1 about country 2 and p₂₁ otherwise. The meaning of such distance is that nearly every dᵗʰ international news from these two countries are about each other. Informational relation between countries is divided into 5 levels: disinterest (blue level), when two countries do not mention each other, standard interest (green level), normal interest (around median), high interest (yellow level), exceptional events such as political tensions, or diplomatic scandals etc. will be signaled by the orange level. Red levels were never reached so far.
Data coming from the sources of information of the two countries clearly highlights three main emergencies/critical situations involving both parties. The first “mutual mentions negative peak” highlights a particularly critical situation: a gunman shooting and harming a US consular official in Mexico. A few weeks later the negative peak in mutual mentions was provoked by the Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto cancelling the meeting with Trump, citing his plan to build the wall. At last, a third negative peak was registered when the Mexican government declared it will not accept deported individuals from the US.
At last, data is also allowing us to spot the frequency at which mutual mentions occur during times of crisis vs times of stability. What emerges from the analysis is that during times of crisis Mexico/Mexican matters are typically present at least once every six international news published by US sources of information. During times of stability and indifference mentions usually occur once every 20 published international news.
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