5/13/08

Mapping Madagascar news by cities.

Here is a simple question: Which cities mention Madagascar-related news ?
It is worth asking because at this stage, Madagascar is not really driving engine search crazy except when animated movies are about to come out (no comment).
The bigger question is who would be interested to know more about Madagascar and news from what regions (countries, cities) would generate the most interest from Malagasy people ?
The reasons for this question are 2 fold:

1) a question asked by l'observatoire des medias and Ethan Zuckerman: "It would be interesting to study the interest clusters for each nation" I understand that Ethan pose the question of the interest from medias from a specific nation towards the rest of the world.
2) From my narrow-minded perspective, I then asked which medias are talking about Madagascar and I also try to have an idea of what Malagasy media are talking about (beside Madagascar).
Even by narrowing the fields in such manner (a nation relatively absent from news and it's medias very focused on internal news), I realized that I would not be able to come up with a comprehensive enough map if I extended the map to a larger chuck of time. So I restricted my search to mid-April and May only on google news, topix.com and a few others French and Malagasy MSM and came up with the map below:


View Larger Map

The data presented is too shallow to be significant but the fun part is that I added a description for each placemark that links to the URL that mentions Madagascar.

You will be surprised to see why Minneapolis, Abilene or Zurich are talking about Madagascar.
My hope is to eventually add the data from the articles translated by the Malagasy Global Voices Lingua project and compare the regions mentioned to those addressed by Malagasy news media.

On the map, you will see that red placemarks are in theory news from Malagasy MSM about other cities ( it's very incomplete at this point) and in blue, outside media talking about Madagascar ( more complete). Again this is only from articles published within the past 2 months and with an avoidable bias towards Anglophone medias.
If you are a map geek and have a more efficient way to go about this, please don't hesitate to take over.

7 comments:

  1. >You will be surprised to see why Minneapolis, Abilene or Zurich are talking about Madagascar.

    I guess ...
    - Minneapolis, the city where the majority of theologians of the Malagasy Lutheran church were formed ...
    - Abilene, fellows Malagasy sent by Ra8 whom has just received his Doctor Honoris Causa from ACU [Abilene Christian University >>
    - Zurich is due to the hall Masoala, which is dedicated to Mada in the Zurich Zoo :)

    Great job Lova, really interesting.

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  2. I just checked the links ... 2 right answers ... am proud of myself :)))

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  3. Not bad, To !

    I did not know that about the Lutheran Church in Minneapolis but I saw that the Church of Latter-Days Saints in Salt Lake City has a video promotion specially translated in Malagasy. Would you know how many Malagasy Mormons there are ?

    Abilene (ACU university) and Nashville (Lipscomb Univ) seem to be the major pole of attention from our Prez.
    I wish that he would give non-Christian affiliated schools a look as well. Those 2 schools are great but a bit of diversification would not hurt.

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  4. 3'683 members splitted in 15 congregagtions ... as quoted in lds.org

    "The first member in Madagascar was Razanapanala Ramiandrisoa, who was baptized in Bordeaux, France, in 1986. He returned to Madagascar in 1989 and began teaching the gospel to a small group of people in his home [...] The Church received legal status in Madagascar on 13 July 1993. The Madagascar Antananarivo Mission was created on 1 July 1998 [...] In 17 September 2000, the Antananarivo Madagascar Stake was created" lds.org >>

    > bit of diversification would not hurt
    Fully agree with you ... but maybe we Malagasy have no more choice that to accept the scholarships granted

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  5. Thank you, To. So it is a relatively young congregation in Madagascar then no ?
    The Malagasy students over there are at ACU are great students and ought to be congratulated for completing their degree with honors.
    I would think other schools would also be open to exchange programs if the gvt were willing.

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  6. hey i thought lafayette would have a major presence there. considering it be the home of the one and only Dr Lova Lova.

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  7. "considering lafayette be the home.."
    Not for much longer, my friend, everything has an end, hey ? :)

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