The anatomy of a crisis

You are invited to watch a PR crisis being played out in front of you.

The University of East Anglia is in the eye of a storm about emails that cast doubt on the accepted wisdom of human involvement in climate change.

I am conducting a series of monthly reviews across the whole of the web showing how this crisis is affecting the reputation of the University - and you can come and watch too.

This crisis also affects science, climate change scientists, governments and politics across the world and there are issues now emerging that affect the nature of science and politics and climate change and global warming.

This is quite transparent research. You too can watch it and can have access to the data.


The first data available is a view of the major semantic drivers evident from internet citations.

You can see the semantic drivers affecting the University of East Anglia here http://bit.ly/8SdZwf

The effect in comment on climate change and global warming is shown in the results here http://bit.ly/5PeNrs

In both cases you can use the slider to go back a year which helps you see how the issues change. At the end of each month the 'Wall' will be updated but every day you can see the new citations that will be added for analysis and presentation in the following month.

In addition, every week, I will present on my blog leverwealth.blogspot.com an analysis of the number of citations identified each day and the citation broken down into news sites, blogs, discussion lists etc.

I will be saving all the citations for both these projects and will make available to universities the list of citations, the most covered national audiences, type of web site (news, blog, discussion list etc), numbers of citations per day etc.

This will mean that, for the first time ever (and as the newspaper paywalls go up) possibly the last time forever, we will have a comprehensive view of the anatomy of a crisis online for research today and in the future.

Below you will find a list of significant climate change bloggers, a Google map showing how far the story has spread and other facilities that a reputation manager might use at a time like this.