An expert-curated global database of online newspaper articles on spiders and spider bites
Mammola, Stefano; Malumbres-Olarte, Jagoba; Arabesky, Valeria; Barrales-Alcala, Diego Alejandro; Barrion-Dupo, Aimee Lynn; Benamú, Marco Antonio; Bird, Tharina L.; Bogomolova, Maria; Cardoso, Pedro; Chatzaki, Maria; Cheng, Ren-Chung; Chu, Tien-Ai; Classen-Rodríguez, Leticia M.; Cupic, Iva; Dhiya’ulhaq, Naufal Urfi; Drapeau Picard, Andre-Philippe; El-Hennawy, Hisham K.; Elverici, Mert; Fukushima, Caroline S.; Ganem, Zeana; Gavish-Regev, Efrat; Gonnye, Naledi T.; Hacala, Axel; Haddad, Charles R.; Hesselberg, Thomas; Ho, Tammy Ai Tian; Into, Thanakorn; Isaia, Marco; Jayaraman, Dharmaraj; Karuaera, Nanguei; Khalap, Rajashree; Khalap, Kiran; Kim, Dongyoung; Korhonen, Tuuli; Kralj-Fiser, Simona; Land, Heidi; Lin, Shou-Wang; Loboda, Sarah; Lowe, Elizabeth; Lubin, Yael; Martínez, Alejandro; Mbo, Zingisile; Milicic, Marija; Kioko, Grace Mwende; Nanni, Veronica; Norma- Rashid, Yusoff; Nwankwo, Daniel; Painting, Christina J.; Pang, Aleck; Pantini, Paolo; Pavlek, Martina; Pearce, Richard; Petcharad, Booppa; Petillon, Julien; Raberahona, Onjaherizo Christian; Saarinen, Joni A .; Segura-Hernández, Laura; Sentenska, Lenka; Uhl, Gabriele; Walker, Leilani; Warui, Charles M.; Wiśniewski, Konrad; Zamani, Alireza; Scott, Catherine; Chuang, Angela
Date:
2022-03-28
Abstract:
Mass media plays an important role in the construction and circulation of risk perception
associated with animals. Widely feared groups such as spiders frequently end up in the
spotlight of traditional and social media. We compiled an expert-curated global database on
the online newspaper coverage of human-spider encounters over the past ten years (2010–
2020). This database includes information about the location of each human-spider encounter
reported in the news article and a quantitative characterisation of the content—location,
presence of photographs of spiders and bites, number and type of errors, consultation of
experts, and a subjective assessment of sensationalism. In total, we collected 5348 unique
news articles from 81 countries in 40 languages. The database refers to 211 identified and
unidentified spider species and 2644 unique human-spider encounters (1121 bites and 147
as deadly bites). To facilitate data reuse, we explain the main caveats that need to be made
when analysing this database and discuss research ideas and questions that can be explored
with it.
Description:
Additional information
Supplementary information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://DOI.
org/10.1038/s41597-022-01197-6.
Author contributions
Conceptualization: SM, JM-O, CS, AC; Data collection & validation: all authors; Data management: SM, VN,
AC; Data analysis & visualization (Figs. 2–5): SM; Summary illustration (Fig. 1): JM-O; Writing (first draft):
SM; Writing, contributions: JM-O, CS, AC; All authors read the text, provided comments, suggestions, and
corrections, and approved the final version.
Code availability
The R code to generate analyses and figures is available in GitHub (https://github.com/StefanoMammola/
Analysis_Global-Spider-News-Database).
