Crisis talk: analysis of the public debate around the energy crisis and
  cost of living
Rrubaa Panchendrarajan Geri Popova Tony Russell-Rose
A prominent media topic in the UK in the early 2020s is the energy crisis
affecting the UK and most of Europe. It brings into a single public debate
issues of energy dependency and sustainability, fair distribution of economic
burdens and cost of living, as well as climate change, risk, and
sustainability. In this paper, we investigate the public discourse around the
energy crisis and cost of living to identify how these pivotal and
contradictory issues are reconciled in this debate and to identify which social
actors are involved and the role they play. We analyse a document corpus
retrieved from UK newspapers from January 2014 to March 2023. We apply a
variety of natural language processing and data visualisation techniques to
identify key topics, novel trends, critical social actors, and the role they
play in the debate, along with the sentiment associated with those actors and
topics. We combine automated techniques with manual discourse analysis to
explore and validate the insights revealed in this study. The findings verify
the utility of these techniques by providing a flexible and scalable pipeline
for discourse analysis and providing critical insights for cost of living -
energy crisis nexus research.