Work Package 3 - Journalistic, mass mediated political texts
© Paul Balluff
Work Package 3 - Journalistic, mass mediated political texts
Journalistic, mass mediated political texts in their various forms offer a key resource to study democracy. Journalistic texts are nowadays produced by diverse groups of actors and are accessible in various formats and via various channels. Responding to the challenge of a very rich but also highly fragmented media landscape, WP3 will facilitate the selection, access and work with such data. In detail, WP3 provides an extensive overview about news sources, publicly available data collections, and methods specifically designed to obtain and work with journalistic, mass mediated political texts.
WP3 aims to achieve the following:
1. Overview of types of political texts in media, including contextualisation and conceptualization
WP3 will provide an overview of what types of data are available, together with description of context in which such data are produced. The overview is guiding for data type selection, data parsing and the appropriate linkage of media text data with other data.
2. Inventory of main media sources and classification of research landscape
WP3 provides an inventory (database) of news sources in European countries including relevant meta-information (e.g., audience size, ownership, publication type, language, and information about availability in electronic databases). The establishment this inventory enables researchers to get an overview of the media landscapes in Europe, and to make better informed decision on case selection and research design.
3. Inventory of methods and tools commonly used for scraping, selection, and pre-processing of media texts
The inventory of sources by itself means already a huge step forward. To increase their broad applicability and usability, WP3 supports the acquisition of specialized skills required for the collection and analysis of journalistic, mass-mediated political text.
4. Enabling comparative research across different types of journalistic, mass mediated political texts
Working with the newly created extensive databases, WP3 further contributes to research about data selection for cross-country research and data quality issues that are related to the dynamic nature of media markets.