The GDELT Project

Finding Good News In The Midst Of The Pandemic Using Tone Filtering

In the midst of a global pandemic it can seem that every other news headline is about something negative. How might filtering by the sentiment of each article help locate uplifting and inspiring stories amidst this deluge of negative?

Using the DOC 2.0 API's tone filtering capability, GDELT Summary actually allows you to do exactly this, filtering for "Fairly Positive" and "Fairly Negative" news across the web, allowing you to search for a given keyword and identify just articles with an overall positive tone that mention your keyword.

For example, if we search for "Fairly Positive" English-language articles published in the last month that contain the word "pandemic" to look for coverage of positives emerging from the pandemic we get headlines like these:

Even the most negative of keywords can still reveal a world of positive coverage looking at the bright side of the global pandemic. Using either the DOC 2.0 API (to search for any keyword via GDELT's English machine translations) or the vastly richer tonal dimensions of the GKG 2.0's GCAM (to search for its thematic, geographic and select entity dimensions), it is possible to create lenses onto the world that focus on the positives of each day.