Climate change knowledge on the Hungarian web

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the virtual spaces of the Hungarian web on knowledge production and conversion, using climate change as an example. Further, to map the nodes and the key players in the virtual arena. I tried to “crawl” the issue network of climate change knowledge, the knowledge communities, and their motivations, efforts and main practices in localisations of climate change; how it became local knowledge through the internet. To provide a theoretical basis for the study, I made an overview about the role of the internet in shaping the knowledge-science, as well as knowledge-society relationship. I discussed the changing geography of reading, the emergence of e-science, the changing epistemic culture of scientific fields, the evolving extended peer communities, and questions of accountability and expertise in the light of the democratisation process of knowledge production.

The analysis was performed using Google search as a virtual librarian and browsing climate change contents on the web. Using the Issue Crawler virtual network visualising software I tried to crawl the issue networks of climate change on the web, where the outlinks of a given page formed the basis of the crawl. I performed co-link analysis and inter-actor analysis, applying relevant sites as starting points. In case of co-link analysis the Issue Crawler fetched the outlinks of the starting points and determined which outlinks have at least two starting points in common. These pages could be considered as results in the issue network.

Our results showed here mainly that the Hungarian environmental civic sector formed the basis of the climate change discourse. The inter-actor analysis provided the inter-linking between the starting points; thus it showed that there is a somewhat loose relationship between the Hungarian sites. Some conclusions of our findings could be considered as follows. Climate change has become an important environmental issue, although the linking behaviour of the sites is considerably low, and rather international organisations and media sites (in particular, the IPCC – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) provide the sources for Hungarian knowledge production. The national scientific institutions are largely absent from the online discourse; they remain hidden from the eyes of internet browsers. My investigations produced also several examples of how the problem of global climate change can and might be ported into a Hungarian context, forming in fact virtual local knowledge on climate change.