Technical Note: Building a methodological framework and toolkit for news media dataset tracking of conflict and cooperation dynamics on transboundary rivers

Abstract

Abstract. Management of transboundary rivers will be one of the great political and environmental challenges of the 21st century if knowledge of conflict and cooperation is not fully developed. Transboundary river conflict and cooperation are critical for the sustainable development of river basins, regional security, and stability, and have significant scientific and practical implications. The construction of a dataset of transboundary water events – individual conflictive or cooperative interaction between riparian –provides important data support and factual basis for the study of transboundary rivers. However, the most representative research, the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, is built by means of manual reading for information extraction, thus difficult for fast updating, also does not cover the global changes in the past decade. This research aims to build a methodological framework for news media datasets tracking of conflict and cooperation dynamics on transboundary rivers, provide mass of relevant data for the research of transboundary rivers in the globe, prepare a potent research toolkit, lay a solid foundation for further data mining research, and better suit the big data age. In order to test the effectiveness of the methodological framework and toolkit for dataset construction, this research analyses the word frequency and themes of the articles in datasets. The results show that the datasets built by this framework can reflect comprehensive themes of transboundary water conflict and cooperation. Through the analysis of media activity in different river basins, it is possible to get a global overview of the participation of countries located within and outside of the basin in transboundary water issues.\n