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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue University’s Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability has added a meat sentiment dashboard to its roster of free-access meals system dashboards. The new dashboard, up to date weekly, exhibits the sentiment and quantity of meat and meat different mentions in social media and on-line news.
Users could discover the sentiment and quantity of #Meat mentions in all 50 states individually for social media or your entire nation in a narrowly or broadly outlined time vary beginning with April 2020 in on-line news and social media.
“The general perception is more positive than what the average person might guess,” mentioned Nicole Olynk Widmar, professor and affiliate head of agricultural economics at Purdue. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, consumers could have been sad with meat availability. Meat was accessible, however not at all times precisely what consumers needed, when and the place they needed it.
“Perception is going to reflect a few key headlines that may or may not have correctly reflected the state of the industry. This dashboard gives you a chance to look more holistically across the different products,” she mentioned.
The dashboard’s color-coded sentiment gradient ranges from darkish inexperienced for 100% constructive to darkish purple for 100% destructive. On social media in Indiana from April 2020 to July 2022, for instance, poultry had a internet sentiment of 49.30, adopted by beef at 39.72 and pork at 37.30. Plant-based meat alternate options, in the meantime, rated a barely constructive internet sentiment at 3.20. The quantity of related every day posts throughout this era ranged from a excessive of two,955 to a low of 1,485.
In the news nationwide for a similar time interval, poultry (3 million posts) and pork (2 million posts) each had internet sentiments of 32. Beef got here out with a constructive internet sentiment of 29 over 1 million posts. Plant-based meat alternate options had a internet sentiment of 26 over 387,000 posts.
Individual corporations in varied industries have a revenue motive to privately accumulate and analyze knowledge related to the demand for their very own merchandise. But when it comes to massive knowledge and agriculture, “It’s just sitting there and not being used as well as it could be,” Widmar mentioned.
Widmar mentioned utilizing social media analytics to higher perceive how individuals understand meals merchandise comparable to milk and eggs, amongst different points, at Purdue’s “Dawn or Doom 2018” convention. In 2019, she revealed an article on the insights that massive knowledge supplies into public notion of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 2020, Widmar and Courtney Bir of Oklahoma State University famous the assorted methods of utilizing public knowledge for the general public good.
And in 2021, Widmar and 4 co-authors revealed one other article, on “The anatomy of natural disasters on online media: hurricanes and wildfires,” in the journal Natural Hazards. The article describes how watching knowledge circulation in response to pure disasters may also help authorities organizations determine who wants assist when shortages really happen.
The dashboard is a collaboration between Widmar and Jayson Lusk, the top and Distinguished Professor of Agricultural Economics at Purdue, who leads the CDFAS. They conceived the meat dashboard thought following meat-market disruptions through the COVID-19 pandemic that spurred news headlines of a damaged U.S. meals system. Widmar and Lusk function co-authors of the dashboard, together with CFDAS postdoctoral analysis affiliate Jinho Jung and analysis knowledge analyst and visualization specialist Annapurni Subramaniam.
CFDAS collected the information in collaboration with NetBase Quid via its Intelligence Connector instrument. An article revealed in the July 2022 subject of the journal Meat Science particulars the data-gathering strategies used.
The meat sentiment dashboard brings to seven the variety of dashboards in the “Supply and Production” class. Also accessible are two value dashboards and two shopper spending dashboards.
The strategies embody writing the search algorithms to exclude references to “Peppa” or “Porky” the cartoon pigs in the seek for site visitors about meals pork, for instance. Or calling somebody “a chicken” or saying that somebody has “a beef” with one other particular person as a substitute of speaking about meat for consuming.
The current Meat Science article analyzed the “Perception versus reality of the COVID-19 pandemic in U.S. meat markets.” In that article, Widmar and three co-authors famous wrote that “analysis of online media and U.S. production and cold storage data do not support the narrative that the system ‘broke,’ but was perhaps ‘strained’ and ‘responded efficiently.’”
Widmar and Lusk determined that as a land-grant college, Purdue might make on-line and social media knowledge associated to agriculture available for different individuals to ask associated questions.
“That’s why the dashboard is interesting beyond some of the research that we’ve been able to publish,” Widmar mentioned.
Widmar cautioned dashboard customers to keep in mind the social media world is messy.
“Anybody can put information out there, so it has caveats,” she mentioned. “Just because information is out there doesn’t mean it was right. It really was out there; it’s what people saw. But that doesn’t mean what they saw was 100% accurate.”
Writer: Steve Koppes
Sources: Nicole Widmar. [email protected]
Jayson Lusk, [email protected]
Media contact: Maureen Manier, [email protected]
Agricultural Communications: 765-494-8415;
Maureen Manier, Department Head, [email protected]
Agriculture News Page
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