Quantitative dataset of societal value, technology and policy for human-water system modelling

Value, technology, and policy are three interactive societal practices affecting the willingness, capacity, and formal rules of human interactions with water. The rapidly expanding societal data in texts are generally represented as singular proxies, neglecting the dynamic and accumulated societal processes that affect human decisions and behaviours. Here we developed the Value-Technology-Policy dataset of water. It contains 16,480 newspaper articles, 801 public submissions, 3 historical encyclopaedias of 1337 ancient technologies, 40,340 patents, and 720 policy documents related to water in various spatial (national, regional, state, and river basin) and temporal (decades to hundreds of years) scales. A consistent, 4-step content analysis approach was followed to identify, collect and manually code five key elements: the time (“when”), location (“where”), actors (“who”), themes (“what”), and tone (“what effects”), which jointly defined the dynamic processes of these societal practices. Inter-coder reliability tests were conducted to ensure the consistency and validity of the data. This dataset will contribute to more process-oriented understanding of these societal practices for improved human-water system modelling in the Anthropocene.

价值、技术与政策是影响人类与水互动的意愿、能力及正式规则的三大相互作用社会实践。文本中快速增长的社会数据通常被视为单一代理指标，却忽略了影响人类决策与行为的动态累积性社会过程。为此，我们构建了水领域的价值-技术-政策数据集（Value-Technology-Policy dataset of water）。该数据集包含16480篇新闻文章、801份公众意见提交、3部历史百科全书（含1337项古代技术）、40340项专利及720份政策文件，覆盖水相关议题的多种空间尺度（国家、区域、州、流域）与时间尺度（数十年至数百年）。研究采用一致的四步内容分析法，对时间（“何时”）、地点（“何地”）、行为主体（“谁”）、主题（“何事”）及语气（“何影响”）五大核心要素进行识别、收集与手动编码，这些要素共同定义了上述社会实践的动态过程。该数据集将助力对这些社会实践形成更具过程导向的理解，从而改进人类世背景下的人水系统建模。