Environmental perception in public discourses on conservation in Amazonian digital media
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59410/PREPRINT-UEA-v2026ep07-1207Keywords:
environmental perceptions, discourse analysis, textometry, digital ecosystem, rights of natureAbstract
The Ecuadorian Amazon faces a deepening socio-environmental crisis driven by extractive expansion, deforestation, and the systematic erosion of collective rights. Understanding how public conservation discourses shape environmental perception in this context has become increasingly urgent. This study draws on textometric discourse analysis to examine environmental perception as constructed through public discourse in digital spaces. A corpus of 285 texts was compiled using BootCat, with 42 search tuples combining territorial references, environmental perception concepts, and discursive frameworks of conservation and extractivism. The corpus was divided into two subcorpora: academic (143 texts) and communicational (142 texts). Sentiment analysis in Orange Data Mining showed that academic texts tend toward systematic affective neutrality, reflecting an objectivity-based mode of scientific legitimation, while communicational texts exhibit a bimodal distribution that alternates between denunciation and rights assertion — patterns characteristic of environmental activism and journalism. Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modelling revealed that academic discourse centers on territorial planning, Indigenous rights, and environmental education, whereas communicational discourse clusters around illegal mining, prior consultation, and community communication. A zone of discursive overlap was also identified, pointing to the emergence of hybrid forms in Amazonian digital environmental communication.
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