This document discusses innovative tools for communicating about food and health benefits. It introduces Vizzata, an online tool that uses bite-sized content to elicit questions and comments from participants in order to better understand audiences. It also describes TweetVis, a text mining and data visualization tool that analyzes tweets over time to depict trends in topics, sources, sentiment, and novelty. These tools were developed through the FoodRisC project to help risk communicators engage relevant audiences and analyze social media data.

1. COMMUNICATING FOOD FOR HEALTH BENEFITS
 NEW FOOD TRENDS AND MEANINGS 
 PROFESSIONAL IDENTITIES AND FOOD COMMUNICATION 
 INNOVATIVE PRACTICES IN COMMUNICATION 
8th – 9th November, 2012
TARRAGONA
Communicative strategies for food
benefits: Consumers, technologies and
engagement

2. Julie Barnett
Professor of Health Research
Brunel University, London, UK
With
Dr Afrodita Marcu, Dr Tim Cribbin, Phil Brooker (Brunel)
Dr Rui Gaspar, Sara Gorjão , ISCTE, Lisbon, Portugal
Pieter Rutsaert, University of Ghent, Belgium

3. Innovative Practices in
Communication
Vizzata
Tweetvis
Listening Technologies

4. Vizzata: the principles
Deliberation
Questions
Making sense of information

5. EFSA Risk Communication
Guidelines
“Adjust and modify the
communication
programme in an
organised effort to
collect feedback and to
sense changes in values
and preferences”
One of 4 general guidelines from EFSA's practical guidelines in risk
communications document by EFSA
http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/corporate/pub/riskcommguidelines.htm

6. What is Vizzata?
An online tool for communicators to explore
the reactions of the public to prompt material
Provide bite size chunks of content – text,
video, images
Elicit the questions and comments that
participants have
Measures attentiveness to information
Enables on-going engagement with
participants

8. What does Vizzata do?
 Introduce unfamiliar issues in an engaging
way
 Identify areas of concern, uncertainty,
scepticism and misunderstanding
 Explore differences between groups e.g.
countries, gender, familiarity with the
issue
 Discover what people want more
information about

10. Participants’ questions and comments
UK BE PT Totals
Participants 51 63 60 174
*leaving questions/comments 63% 43% 62% 55%
Total number of questions and comments 155 164 136 455
*requiring answers 75% 72% 81% 76%
Number of questions 48 56 55 159
*requiring answers 79% 71% 81% 77%
Number of comments 107 108 81 296
*requiring answers 74% 73% 81% 75%

11. Questions and comments
per information page

12. To assist risk communicators in engaging
with public and stakeholder communities
in an appropriate, effective and cost
effective manner

13. What is Vizzata?

14. Social Media
Internet-based applications
and platforms that allows
users to create and exchange
content
Interactive, dynamic,
collaborative
User-generated content.
Multi-directional
communication flows

15. The rise in social networking sites
An overview study of the Internet in Britain organised by the
Oxford Internet Institute every two years since 2003
“How often do
you use the
Internet for the
following
purposes?”
Source: Oxford Internet Survey (2011, p. 34)

16. Microblogging and
 Microblogging sending brief updates to large
audiences via the web or mobile devices.
 Twitter is the largest microblogging service
with 500 million users since 2006.
 Conversational elements such as the “@”
symbol as a form of address, RT for retweeting
and # hashtags.
 Twitter during emergency events, e.g. August
2011 riots in England

18. Social media & risk
communication
An

19. Twitter and risk communication
Evaluating metrics
 Mentions
 Retweets
 Followers
 Sending fast  Click throughs
topical alerts
 Pointing users to
online content “Search Twitter for comments
 Disseminating about your organisation or
original message health topic: You can use
search.twitter.com to monitor
Twitter. You can then ‘listen’ to
conversations about important
health concerns, find messages
about your organisation and
monitor how audiences are
responding to messages”
CDC,

20. Twitter and risk communication
“The internet has become an established forum
for interactive debate and discussion about the
causes and consequences of hazards… citizens
increasingly play an active role in collecting,
reporting and analysing news information”
1Mythen, G. (2010). "Reframing risk? Citizen journalism and the transformation of news." Journal of Risk Research 13(1):
45-58.

21. What is the value of the
information that Twitter gives?
 Gives you more information?
 Gives you better information?
 Gives you different information?
 Gives more precise information?
 Gives you the same information
more easily?
 Gives you the same information
economically?

22. Social media content as
data
Analysis of comments on BBC news story about bird flu
as data 1
Using Amazon product reviews as data 2
Use of search terms for predicting incidence or the
location of influenza outbreaks
1
Rowe, G., G. Hawkes, et al. (2008). "Initial UK public reaction to avian influenza: Analysis of opinions posted on the BBC website."
Health Risk & Society 10(4): 361-384
2
Money, A., J. Barnett, et al. (2011). "Public Claims about Automatic External Defibrillators: An Online Consumer Opinions Study."
BMC Public Health 11(1): 332.

23. TWEETVIS: text mining
and data visualisation tool
o Depicts the frequency distribution of tweets, selected on
key words, over specified time period within chosen time
intervals
o Shows profile of source citations in each period
o Can be layered against key known risk ‘events’
o Depicts the novelty profile
o Changes in term use since preceding time interval
o Terms that discriminate one interval from all intervals
o Sentiment analysis – using SentiStrength
o Visual depiction of how common term occurrence is over
time

26. Rise and fall of cucumber
SPANISH CUCUMBERS
TESTED + FOR EHEC
EHEC STRAIN NOT FOUND
ON SPANISH CUCUMBERS
LINK BETWEEN EHEC AND
SPROUTS STRENGTHENS
LINK WITH BEAN SPROUTS
AND ORGANIC FARM IN
HAMBURG FSA ADVISES NOT TO EAT
RAW BEAN SPROUTS
BEAN SPROUTS IDENTIFIED
AS LIKELY EHEC CAUSE DRIED FENUGREEK SEEDS
IDENTIFIED AS THE LIKELY
CAUSE OF ECOLI OUTBREAK

27. Information sources cited
SPANISH CUCUMBERS TESTED +
FOR EHEC
LINK WITH BEAN SPROUTS
AND ORGANIC FARM IN
HAMBURG
EHEC STRAIN NOT FOUND
ON SPANISH CUCUMBERS
• How

28. The FoodRisC project is developing tools to assist risk
communicators with their listening enterprises
Vizzata is a method to engage relevant publics in deliberation
to understand attentiveness, values, concerns and questions
to inform or contribute to decision making processes
TweetVis enables communicators to analyse and visualise Twitter
data
moves beyond basic social media evaluation methods
interactive representations of data
mapping changing profiles of data over time

29. Please contact the project team if you would like any
further information about either of these
communication tools
We are seeking risk communicators to partner us in
research and communication enterprises using both
Vizzata and TweetVis
Thank you for listening!
Any questions?
Julie.Barnett@brunel.ac.uk