An expert-curated global database of online newspaper articles on spiders and spider bites

Stefano Mammola (1) , Jagoba Malumbres-Olarte (2) , Valeria Arabesky , Diego Alejandro Barrales-Alcalá , Aimee Lynn Barrion-Dupo , Marco Antonio Benamú , Tharina Bird , Maria Bogomolova , Pedro Cardoso (1) , Maria Chatzaki (3) , Ren-Chung Cheng , Tien-Ai Chu , Leticia Classen-Rodríguez , Iva Čupić , Naufal Urfi Dhiya’ulhaq (4) , André-Philippe Drapeau Picard , Hisham El-Hennawy , Mert Elverici , Caroline Fukushima , Zeana Ganem , Efrat Gavish-Regev , Naledi Gonnye , Axel Hacala (5) , Charles Haddad , Thomas Hesselberg , Tammy Ai Tian Ho , Thanakorn Into , Marco Isaia , Dharmaraj Jayaraman , Nanguei Karuaera , Rajashree Khalap , Kiran Khalap , Dongyoung Kim , Tuuli Korhonen , Simona Kralj-Fišer , Heidi Land , Shou-Wang Lin , Sarah Loboda , Elizabeth Lowe , Yael Lubin , Alejandro Martínez , Zingisile Mbo , Marija Miličić , Grace Mwende Kioko , Veronica Nanni , Yusoff Norma-Rashid , Daniel Nwankwo , Christina Painting , Aleck Pang , Paolo Pantini , Martina Pavlek , Richard Pearce , Booppa Petcharad , Julien Pétillon (5) , Onjaherizo Christian Raberahona , Joni Saarinen , Laura Segura-Hernández , Lenka Sentenská , Gabriele Uhl , Leilani Walker , Charles Warui , Konrad Wiśniewski , Alireza Zamani , Catherine Scott , Angela Chuang

1 Helsingin yliopisto = Helsingfors universitet = University of Helsinki
2 Universidade dos Açores
3 DUTH - Democritus University of Thrace
4 The University of Tennessee [Knoxville]
5 ECOBIO - Ecosystèmes, biodiversité, évolution [Rennes]

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.

Domains: Environmental Sciences; Biodiversity and Ecology

Stefano Mammola, Jagoba Malumbres-Olarte, Valeria Arabesky, Diego Alejandro Barrales-Alcalá, Aimee Lynn Barrion-Dupo, et al.. An expert-curated global database of online newspaper articles on spiders and spider bites. Scientific Data , 2022, 9 (1), pp.109. ⟨10.1038/s41597-022-01197-6⟩. ⟨hal-03657025⟩