Polarization in Blogging About the Paris Meeting on Climate Change.

To what extent was the blogging about the recent Paris meeting on climate change polarized? This paper addresses this question by way of a series of analyses of a comprehensive corpus of English language blog posts about the negotiations to reach an agreement to mitigate climate change. We identify two groups of bloggers, the engaged bloggers and the contrarian bloggers and use the contents of their blog posts and the patterns in their linking to sources to characterize and compare the two groups. The paper combines computational methods and manual analyses and uses co-citation networks in an innovative way to characterize and compare the contexts of the linking in the two groups. We address challenges that using computational methods to study polarization in blogs raises. We argue that the ideological profiles of the sources the blogs link to are clear signals of polarization.