基于新闻数据的新冠疫情事件下“全球-中国”国际关系变化分析方法

The Analysis Method of Changes in"Global-China"International Relations during the COVID-19 Event based on News Data

在新冠疫情的冲击下,国际关系错综复杂、瞬息万变,不稳定性不确定性剧增。全面及时地分析"全球-中国"国际关系变化特征,对于中国的外交发展规划具有重要的参考价值。复杂的国际关系可以分解为一系列事件单元,新闻数据中蕴含了时间、地点、人物、事物等关键信息,是构建事件的最直接、最全面的信息来源。本文以GDELT(Global Database of Events,Language,and Tone)新闻事件数据库为数据源,基于"全球-中国"的视角,利用2020年1—5月全球疫情相关新闻数据,研究新冠疫情事件背景下的国际关系的变化。本文首先以事件数量、事件强度值和事件被提及数作为关键变量,提出了国际关系的分类表达和计算模型,解决了国际关系表达模糊和难以计算的问题。然后从时空可视化角度展示疫情下国际关系的变化特征,并结合疫情期间的国际重要事件,进一步分析引起国际关系变化的原因。研究表明,采用本文方法能精确掌握新冠疫情下"全球—中国"国际关系的发展程度,发现"全球-中国"国际关系的变化规律和变化原因,具有重要的应用价值。本文的研究可以为大数据时代的国际关系研究提供一个新的视角,同时也为新闻数据的分析提供参考。

The outbreak of the COVID-19 event has been a major international concern since the first case was discovered in December 2019.After mid-to-late February 2020,the daily number of newly diagnosed cases abroad has increased rapidly,showing the characteristics of a pandemic disease.Under the deep impact of the COVID-19 event,the international relations are intricate and ever-changing.The instability and uncertainty of international relations have increased dramatically and have brought profound changes to the economy,security,and diplomacy.A comprehensive and timely analysis of"Global-China"international relations and its changing characteristics has important reference value for China’s diplomatic development planning.Complex international relations can be split up into a series of event units.News data contains key information such as time,location,people,things,etc.It is the most direct and comprehensive source of information for constructing events.The GDELT(Global Database of Events,Language,and Tone)is a free and open news database which monitors news from print,broadcast,and online media in the world then analyzes the texts and extracts the key information such as people,location,organization,and event.From the perspective of"Global-China",this paper takes GDELT as the data source and uses global news data about the COVID-19 event from January to May2020 to analyze the changes in international relations.First of all,the characteristics of international relations,such as intensity,similarity and polarity,are consistent with emotions.According to Plutchik’s wheel of emotions,this paper provides a representation and calculation model of international relations to solve the problem of ambiguity in representation and the difficulty in calculation,using key variables including the number of events,the intensity of events,and the number of mentioned events.Then,the features of the changes in international relations are obviously displayed from the perspective of spatio-temporal visualization.Finally,this paper analyzes the causes of changes in international relations by important international events during the COVID-19 event.The results show that the analysis method can accurately reveal the development degree of the"Global-China"international relations during the COVID-19 event and find out the rules and causes of changes and has important application value.This paper can provide a new perspective for the exploration of international relations and a reference for the analysis of news data in the era of big data.And it shows the great potential and broad prospect of the research on international relations of big data.