The Houston Foresight program is initiating a research project to track, collect and analyze mentions of futurists in the media. The goal is to gather evidence for how futurists are being talked about in the media. The initial idea for this project was suggested by APF member Natalie Ambrose in 2008.* In our Pro Seminar class, we have long been doing a module on coverage of futurists in the media that reviews a sample of articles about the field. We feel the time is right to launch a systematic effort here at the university, as it is more important than ever to the profession and we have a supply of capable students to do the work.
The project kicked off last spring with graduate student Gerold “Boo” Gafford. We experimented with different ways to find the mentions of futurists in the media. He devised a social media bot to capture mentions of futurists on Twitter and Reddit. We concluded, after reviewing results, that it was not a high-leverage approach and have tabled it for now. Simply creating a Google Alert for “Futurist” proved to be more useful.
The trial run on Google Alerts used the search term “futurist(s)” between 1/1/2015 and 4/1/2015 resulted in in approximately 800 unfiltered hits. Of these, 300 articles were filtered out because the body of the piece did not mention futurists (in a sidebar or header data) Thus, 500 pieces were tagged and summarized. A preliminary sort made sure the piece related to futurists (taking out, for instance, the art movement or the band – 114 total hits). We also sorted out press releases (84) announcing presentations by futurists. Thus, we were left with 332 articles were written mentioning futurists, or This 3.6 pieces per day over the three-month time period.
In this semester’s project, two new students are involved, Will Williamson and Joe Murphy. There are three components to this project, based on how we organize our scanning process.
- Finding: We are continuing to use Google Alerts. Since Joe is a professional librarian, he is exploring other avenues to improve our search.
- Collecting: The previous APF effort involved creating an annotated bibliography or abstracts of relevant articles. For this project, we decided to use the Diigo social bookmarking site (we are keeping it private…at least for now), which we used to collect scanning hits for our Student Needs 2025+ project.
- Analyzing: We are still working through how to analyze the results. For now, each piece is tagged with the following:
- Name (of “futurist”)
- Note if APF member
- Note Whether organizational, consulting, academic, “wannabe”
- Topic of piece
- Article-specific tags
- Tone of coverage: Positive – negative – neutral
We will regularly report on findings via the blog. Andy Hines
* The focus of this APF effort was broader – on futures in general (not just futurists as we are doing here). Some intermittent work was done on the project over the next few years, but the project lost momentum. Natalie and I did put together an annotated bibliography of interesting articles that were collected while the project operated.
