only to support our study but also to make our
information available to researchers investigating
bituminous sands. The classification experiments
were conducted using Matlab 2016 on a 64-bit
architecture running Windows 7 with 16 GB of
memory. Note that the six categories of images
namely graphics, machines, people, landscape,
protest and open-pit were initially labelled by a
domain expert. These categories where determined
by experts in media studies. The search process
returns the indexes for all of the pictures that match
the query image’s visual words, ranked from best
(nearest) to worst. The maximum number of
retrieved images was set to 20, as determined after
consultation with our domain experts.
4.1 Exploring Stakeholder Imagery
The Stakeholders in the Mediatoil database may be
divided into six categories, namely Aboriginal
Peoples, Civil Society: Pro-Oil Sands, Civil Society:
Anti-Oil Sands, Industry, Provincial Government,
and Federal Government. (Note that the Aboriginal
Peoples category contained only 15 documents, and
our analysis suggests that all of the images from this
category were against the oil sands. Consequently,
our discussion will be focused on the other five
categories.)
The pictures from the Industry and Provincial
Government categories may be dated back to 1967
and 1925, respectively. The year 2004 was a
breakthrough year when Civil Society images
related to the oil sands came into existence, but they
produced only two documents for the period 2004-
2005. It was thus found that 2006 was a
distinguishing year, given that this is when Civil
Society became more politically active in opposing
the oil sands.
Figure 2 depicts some imagery used by the three
main stakeholders, namely Suncor Energy, the
Government of Alberta, and Environmental
Defence. Based on the number of documents
available, these entities are leaders in Industry,
Government, and Civil Society: Anti Oil Sands,
respectively.
Figure 3 shows a comparison of the type of
images used by the three main organizations, as the
debate evolved over time. The evaluation includes
pictures from 2006 to mid-2016 (when data
collection stopped). From the graphs, it was clear
that Suncor Energy was the only organization
actively giving its views on the tar sands in the years
from 2006 to 2008. In 2008, the Government of
Alberta focused on the controversial tar sands by
utilizing machine/infrastructure pictures as the
instrument for promoting its views. Suncor Energy
proceeded in the same way, although in addition to
machines they also promoted their thoughts using
the open-pit and people classes.
In contrast, as Environmental Defence was in its
inception phase, they had only three documents in
that year. This small amount of images was due to
the fact that this organization was newly formed.
The figures show that the imagery focusing on
people and graphics dominate the imagery used by
Suncor Energy. Interestingly, there was a later
tendency to move towards graphics rather than
people, while Environment Defence tends to
increase their focus on graphics, protest and people.
The focus on machines is steadily declining, as
the debate continues. Further, Suncor Energy has
less focus on open-pit, while the other role-players
do engage this argument later in the timeline. The
two main themes commonly found in the
Government of Alberta images were people
(workers, eminent personalities in formal apparel)
and oil sands infrastructure. The earliest recorded
picture was from mid-1920s. After 2006, the use of
people in photographs was reduced by 25%, while
the use of machines in images was reduced to one
third in comparison to the earlier period. However,
landscape imagery showed an increase by a factor of
two during the same period.
Government and industries were facing rising
opposition from civil society about the destruction of
natural resources. Consequently, landscape images
were used by government to show how well the oil
companies are doing vis-à-vis returning the land to
its natural state.
In addition, there was a decline in using the
images of well-known pro-oil sands advocates as
well as activists, by all role players. Rather, the
imagery focused on generic images of families and
nature.
As expected, industry and government groups in
favour of the oil sands produced documents that
show the positive impact on life, society and culture.
Their focus was on showing oil as an essential
commodity in every aspect of our existence, while
the civil society opponents focused more on graphics
containing protest imagery and pictures of actual
protesters.
4.2 Multi-domain Learning
In this section, we discuss the results when exploring
the data in a supervised learning setting. Recall that
our database contains six classes of images, as