P. W. Keys1 and A. E. Meyer1
1 School of Global Environmental Sustainability,
Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA
Corresponding author: Patrick Keys
(patrick.keys@colostate.edu)
Key Points:
- Imaginative scenarios are an essential approach for designing futures
in an accelerating era of social and environmental change in the
Arctic.
- Story-based scenarios blended with computational text analysis provide
an entirely new method for envisioning the future.
- Our scenario methods mirror other work on Arctic futures, though with
important idiosyncrasies related to divergent regional changes.
Abstract
The future of Arctic social systems and natural environments is highly
uncertain. Climate change will lead to unprecedented phenomena in the
pan-Arctic region, such as regular shipping traffic through the Arctic
Ocean, urban growth, military activity, expanding agricultural
frontiers, and transformed Indigenous societies. While intergovernmental
to local organizations have produced numerous synthesis-based visions of
the future, a challenge in any scenario exercise is capturing the
‘possibility’ space of change. In this work, we employ a computational
text analysis to generate unique thematic input for novel, story-based
visions of the Arctic. Specifically, we develop a corpus of more than
2,000 articles in publicly accessible, English-language Arctic
newspapers that discuss the future in the Arctic. We then perform a
latent Dirichlet allocation, resulting in ten distinct topics and sets
of associated keywords. From these topics and keywords, we design ten
story-based scenarios employing the Mānoa mashup, science fiction
prototyping, and other methods. Our results demonstrate that
computational text analysis can feed directly into a creative futuring
process, whereby the output stories can be traced clearly back to the
original topics and keywords. We discuss our findings in the context of
the broader field of Arctic scenarios and show that the results of this
computational text analysis produce complementary stories to the
existing scenario literature. We conclude that story-based scenarios can
provide vital texture toward understanding the myriad possible Arctic
futures.