Wouter Van Atteveldt
Biographic Data
| ID | 4393553 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wouter Van Atteveldt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Wouter |
| FAMILY NAME | Van Atteveldt |
| SIGNATURE | VAN ATTEVELDT W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1237-538X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 497 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
What is news? Mapping the diversity of news experiences in digital trace data
Political communication research centers the definition of news around institutions and norms tied to professional journalism. However, qualitative audience research increasingly shows that this approach does not match the reality of citizens anymore – news has become a much more fluid, fragmented concept than just what has been produced by journalists. Not accounting for these changes means that researchers are missing out on important sources o…
Nudges for news recommenders: Prominent article positioning increases selection, engagement, and recall of environmental news, but reducing complexity does not
News aggregators inherently constitute choice architectures in which placement and presentation of news articles in the user interface affect how people perceive and engage with them. Accordingly, deliberate changes of a news aggregators’ choice architecture may nudge engagement. Against this background, our study aims to test the effects of 2 nudges, namely a position and an accessibility nudge, on (a) the selection of, (b) the engagement with, …
Nudging News Readers: A Mixed-Methods Approach to Understanding When and How Interface Nudges Affect News Selection
Building on research on nudging as well as democratic news recommender design, this preregistered study employed a mixed-methods design to explore how interface nudges and article positioning affect news selection. Specifically, we tested whether a position nudge as well as three different types of interface nudges (e.g., popularity cues and social norm interventions) can facilitate readers’ engagement with current affairs news over other genres.…
Beware of the watchdog: Politics-media-politics dynamics in the Dutch childcare benefits scandal
This study examines the politics–media–politics (PMP) dynamics surrounding the Dutch childcare benefits scandal. Drawing on a large-scale longitudinal dataset covering nearly two decades (2004–2021) and an in-depth mixed-methods analysis of three critical periods, we explore how interactions between media and politics shaped the public discourse of this issue. Our findings show that a sustained and substantive public debate emerges only when poli…
It ain't easy: Using normatively motivated news diversification to facilitate policy support, tolerance, and political participation
Proponents of ‘democratic news recommender design’ argue that algorithmic news diversification may facilitate democratic participation. However, while various news diversification metrics have been proposed in recent years, few of them have been put to the test with real users. To assess the promises and pitfalls of algorithmic news diversification, we conduct a 2 (low vs. high levels of activating language) by 3 (low vs medium vs high levels of …
Whose truth is it anyway? An experiment on annotation bias in times of factual opinion polarization
Information shapes citizens’ political decision-making. This process is amply studied by social scientists, for whom human annotation is a crucial instrument in their toolkit. Due to the democratization of data and the advances in NLP more data can be analyzed or classified, making these benchmarks more important than ever: An algorithm trained on biased data will reproduce and often exacerbate bias. Currently, disagreement and bias are often con…
How shared ties and journalistic cultures shape global news coverage of disruptive media events: The case of the 9/11 terror attacks
In recent decades, disruptive media events, such as major terrorist attacks, have gained increasing relevance in news coverage around the world. Despite the growing importance of such globally broadcast media events, little research to date has examined cross-national variation in event coverage or the predictors of this variation. This study examines news coverage about the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States across 51 countries to analyze …
On Measurement Validity and Language Models: Increasing Validity and Decreasing Bias with Instructions
Language models like BERT or GPT are becoming increasingly popular measurement tools, but are the measurements they produce valid? Literature suggests that there is still a relevant gap between the ambitions of computational text analysis methods and the validity of their outputs. One prominent threat to validity is hidden biases in the training data, where models learn group-specific language patterns instead of the concept researchers want to m…
Less Annotating, More Classifying: Addressing the Data Scarcity Issue of Supervised Machine Learning with Deep Transfer Learning and Bert-NLI
Supervised machine learning is an increasingly popular tool for analyzing large political text corpora. The main disadvantage of supervised machine learning is the need for thousands of manually annotated training data points. This issue is particularly important in the social sciences where most new research questions require new training data for a new task tailored to the specific research question. This paper analyses how deep transfer learni…
Challenging the Global Cultural Conflict Narrative: An Automated Content Analysis on How PerPetrator Identity Shapes Worldwide News Coverage of Islamist and Right-Wing Terror Attacks
Recent terrorist attacks such as the Christchurch mosque attacks in 2019 renew the discussion of whether right-wing attacks are reported less negatively than Islamist attacks. To clarify this point, our study is the first to combine the selection of media inside and outside the West with a distinction between Islamist and right-wing attacks. We compare coverage given to thirty-two right-wing and forty Islamist attacks from 2015 to 2019 in nine We…
Integrating Communication Science and Computational Methods to Study Content-Based Social Media Effects
A pressing societal and scientific question is how social media use affects our cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. To answer this question, fine-grained insight into the content of individuals' social media use is needed. It is difficult to study content-based social media effects with traditional survey methods because such methods are incapable of capturing the extreme volume and variety of social media content that is shared and received. Th…
Advancing Automated Content Analysis for a New Era of Media Effects Research: The Key Role of Transfer Learning
The availability of individual-level digital trace data offers exciting new ways to study media uses and effects based on the actual content that people encountered. In this article, we argue that to really reap the benefits of this data, we need to update our methodology for automated text analysis. We review challenges for the automatic identification of theoretically relevant concepts in texts along three dimensions: format/style, language , a…
Nudging towards news diversity: A theoretical framework for facilitating diverse news consumption through recommender design
Growing concern about the democratic impact of automatically curated news platforms urges us to reconsider how such platforms should be designed. We propose a theoretical framework for personalised diversity nudges that can stimulate diverse news consumption on the individual level. To examine potential benefits and limitations of existing diversity nudges, we conduct an interdisciplinary literature review that synthesises theoretical work on new…
Linking event archives to news: A computational method for analyzing the gatekeeping process
Digital archives that document real-world events provide new opportunities for large-scale analyses of how news coverage represents reality. We present a method and open-source tool for linking event data to news articles, and demonstrate its application with an analysis of event and country level predictors of terrorism coverage in The Guardian from 2006 to 2018, using event data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). Our method builds on est…
The Validity of Sentiment Analysis: Comparing Manual Annotation, Crowd-Coding, Dictionary Approaches, and Machine Learning Algorithms
Sentiment is central to many studies of communication science, from negativity and polarization in political communication to analyzing product reviews and social media comments in other sub-fields. This study provides an exhaustive comparison of sentiment analysis methods, using a validation set of Dutch economic headlines to compare the performance of manual annotation, crowd coding, numerous dictionaries and machine learning using both traditi…
Multiperspectival Normative Assessment: The Case of Mediated Reactions to Terrorism
This article provides a model for how communication phenomena can be normatively assessed using multiple normative perspectives simultaneously. We exemplify the procedure of multiperspectival normative assessment (MNA) using mediated reactions to terrorism as our case in point. We first identify the normative challenges related to the speed and substance of terrorism communication and the ways in which relations of solidarity are communicatively …
The Unified Framework of Media Diversity: A Systematic Literature Review
How to study media diversity has become a major concern in today’s media landscape. Many expect that algorithmic filtering and a shift of audiences from legacy media to new intermediaries decrease the diversity of news diets, leading to fragmented societies, polarization and spread of misinformation. Different fields, from journalism research to law and computer science, are involved in the study of media diversity. They operate, however, with va…
Reproducible Extraction of Cross-lingual Topics (rectr)
With global media content databases and online content being available, analyzing topical structures in different languages simultaneously has become an urgent computational task. Some previous studies have analyzed topics in a multilingual corpus by translating all items into a single language using a machine translation service, such as Google Translate. We argue that this method is not reproducible in the long run and proposes a new method – R…
The Trouble with Sharing Your Privates: Pursuing Ethical Open Science and Collaborative Research across National Jurisdictions Using Sensitive Data
Open science and effective collaboration both require the sharing of data between researchers. This is especially true for computational methods, as the technical complexity and heterogeneous data sources often require collaboration between researchers in different institutions and jurisdictions. Many data sources, however, cannot be shared openly because of copyright law and contracts such as terms of service. These regulations can be complex, s…
The Combined Effects of Mass Media and Social Media on Political Perceptions and Preferences
Changes in political perceptions and preferences may result from the combined effects of news from various media. Estimating these combined effects requires the best possible, albeit different, measures of news obtained from self-selected mass media and social media that can be linked to panel survey data concerning perceptions and preferences. For the 2017 Dutch national elections, such data is available. Political perceptions and preferences ar…
Studying Muslim Stereotyping through Microportrait Extraction
Research from communication science has shown that stereotypical ideas are often reflected in language use. Media coverage of different groups in society influences the perception people have about these groups and even increases distrust and polarization among different groups. Investigating the forms of (especially subtle) stereotyping can raise awareness to journalists and help prevent reinforcing oppositions between groups in society. Conduct…
Role-based Association of Verbs, Actions, and Sentiments with Entities in Political Discourse
A crucial challenge in measuring how text represents an entity is the need to associate each representative expression with a relevant entity to generate meaningful results. Common solutions to this problem are usually based on proximity methods that require a large corpus to reach reasonable levels of accuracy. We show how such methods for the association between an entity and a representation yield a high percentage of false positives at the ex…
When Communication Meets Computation: Opportunities, Challenges, and Pitfalls in Computational Communication Science
The recent increase in digitally available data, tools, and processing power is fostering the use of computational methods to the study of communication. This special issue discusses the validity of using big data in communication science and showcases a number of new methods and applications in the fields of text and network analysis. Computational methods have the potential to greatly enhance the scientific study of communication because they a…
Partial priming: How issue news shapes issue saliency, which shapes turnout but not the vote
Text Analysis in R
Computational text analysis has become an exciting research field with many applications in communication research. It can be a difficult method to apply, however, because it requires knowledge of various techniques, and the software required to perform most of these techniques is not readily available in common statistical software packages. In this teacher’s corner, we address these barriers by providing an overview of general steps and operati…
News selection criteria in the digital age: Professional norms versus online audience metrics
On newspaper websites, journalists can observe the preferences of the audience in unprecedented detail and for low costs, based on the audience clicks (i.e. page views) for specific news articles. This article addresses whether journalists use this information to cater to audience preferences in their news selection choices. We analyzed the print and online editions of five national newspapers from the Netherlands with a mixed-method approach. Us…
Relative Political and Value Proximity in Mediated Public Diplomacy: The Effect of State-Level Homophily on International Frame Building
This article applies the homophily thesis to public diplomacy and offers an empirical examination of a country's success in its mediated public diplomacy efforts. It analyzes international frame building, the process of creating or changing media frames in the international communications arena, by applying it to the case of Israeli mediated public diplomacy efforts during the war in Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009. The article claims that one wa…
The Validity of Sentiment Analysis: Comparing Manual Annotation, Crowd-Coding, Dictionary Approaches, and Machine Learning Algorithms
Sentiment is central to many studies of communication science, from negativity and polarization in political communication to analyzing product reviews and social media comments in other sub-fields. This study provides an exhaustive comparison of sentiment analysis methods, using a validation set of Dutch economic headlines to compare the performance of manual annotation, crowd coding, numerous dictionaries and machine learning using both traditi…
When Communication Meets Computation: Opportunities, Challenges, and Pitfalls in Computational Communication Science
The recent increase in digitally available data, tools, and processing power is fostering the use of computational methods to the study of communication. This special issue discusses the validity of using big data in communication science and showcases a number of new methods and applications in the fields of text and network analysis. Computational methods have the potential to greatly enhance the scientific study of communication because they a…
Global Angling with a Local Angle: How U.S., British, and Dutch Newspapers Frame Global and Local Terrorist Attacks
The 9/11 terrorist attacks and later attacks such as those in London and Madrid shocked the world and found their way into the newspapers of many countries. The authors study the international coverage of these events in the context of globalization versus localization and the creation of the dominant post-cold war frame of the War on Terror. Using automatic co-occurrence analysis based on the notion of associative framing, they investigate wheth…
Parsing, Semantic Networks, and Political Authority Using Syntactic Analysis to Extract Semantic Relations from Dutch Newspaper Articles
Analysis of political communication is an important aspect of political research. Thematic content analysis has yielded considerable success both with manual and automatic coding, but Semantic Network Analysis has proven more difficult, both for humans and for the computer. This article presents a system for an automated Semantic Network Analysis of Dutch texts. The system automatically extracts relations between political actors based on the out…
Less Annotating, More Classifying: Addressing the Data Scarcity Issue of Supervised Machine Learning with Deep Transfer Learning and Bert-NLI
Supervised machine learning is an increasingly popular tool for analyzing large political text corpora. The main disadvantage of supervised machine learning is the need for thousands of manually annotated training data points. This issue is particularly important in the social sciences where most new research questions require new training data for a new task tailored to the specific research question. This paper analyses how deep transfer learni…
Text Analysis in R
Computational text analysis has become an exciting research field with many applications in communication research. It can be a difficult method to apply, however, because it requires knowledge of various techniques, and the software required to perform most of these techniques is not readily available in common statistical software packages. In this teacher’s corner, we address these barriers by providing an overview of general steps and operati…
A Gatekeeper among Gatekeepers: News agency influence in print and online newspapers in the Netherlands
This paper investigates the influence of news agency Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANP) on the coverage and diversity of political news in Dutch national newspapers. Using computational text analysis, we analyzed the influence on print newspapers across three years (1996, 2008, and 2013) and compared influence on print and online newspapers in 2013. Results indicate that the influence of ANP on print newspapers only increased slightly. Online n…
Party Leaders in the Media and Voting Behavior: Priming Rather Than Learning or Projection
The prominence of party leaders in the media is one of the presumed causes of leader effects (i.e., the influence of party leader evaluation on the voting decision). Yet there is scant knowledge of the relationship between attention for party leaders in the news and the weight of party leader evaluations in the voting decision. This study fills this research gap by examining the effect of exposure to personalized coverage on the weight of party l…
Financial news and market panics in the age of high-frequency sentiment trading algorithms
Whether financial news may contribute to market panics is not an innocent question. A positive answer is easily used as a legitimation to limit the freedom of financial journalists. Long-term effects of news are moreover inconsistent with the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), which maintains that new information gives immediately rise to a new equilibrium. The EMH is under discussion, however, as a result of the transformation of financial marke…
Media logic in election campaign coverage
The media logic thesis holds that the content of political news is the product of news values and format requirements that media make use of to attract news consumers. This study tests whether three content characteristics – personalized, contest and negative coverage – manifest a single media logic by analysing whether they co-vary over time. It also tests the implicit assumption underlying the media logic thesis that media adhere to a single me…
Clause Analysis: Using Syntactic Information to Automatically Extract Source, Subject, and Predicate from Texts with an Application to the 2008–2009 Gaza War
This article presents a new method and open source R package that uses syntactic information to automatically extract source–subject–predicate clauses. This improves on frequency-based text analysis methods by dividing text into predicates with an identified subject and optional source, extracting the statements and actions of (political) actors as mentioned in the text. The content of these predicates can be analyzed using existing frequency-bas…
Good News or Bad News? Conducting Sentiment Analysis on Dutch Text to Distinguish Between Positive and Negative Relations
Many research questions in political communication can be answered by representing text as a network of positive or negative relations between actors and issues such as conducted by semantic network analysis. This article presents a system for automatically determining the polarity (positivity/negativity) of these relations by using techniques from sentiment analysis. We used a machine learning model trained on the manually annotated news coverag…
Reproducible Extraction of Cross-lingual Topics (rectr)
With global media content databases and online content being available, analyzing topical structures in different languages simultaneously has become an urgent computational task. Some previous studies have analyzed topics in a multilingual corpus by translating all items into a single language using a machine translation service, such as Google Translate. We argue that this method is not reproducible in the long run and proposes a new method – R…
Role-based Association of Verbs, Actions, and Sentiments with Entities in Political Discourse
A crucial challenge in measuring how text represents an entity is the need to associate each representative expression with a relevant entity to generate meaningful results. Common solutions to this problem are usually based on proximity methods that require a large corpus to reach reasonable levels of accuracy. We show how such methods for the association between an entity and a representation yield a high percentage of false positives at the ex…
Partial priming: How issue news shapes issue saliency, which shapes turnout but not the vote
Nudging towards news diversity: A theoretical framework for facilitating diverse news consumption through recommender design
Growing concern about the democratic impact of automatically curated news platforms urges us to reconsider how such platforms should be designed. We propose a theoretical framework for personalised diversity nudges that can stimulate diverse news consumption on the individual level. To examine potential benefits and limitations of existing diversity nudges, we conduct an interdisciplinary literature review that synthesises theoretical work on new…
The Impact of the Explosion of EU News on Voter Choice in the 2014 EU Elections
The European elections in 2014 were the first to be held after a long period in which EU-related news was prominent in the media. They were held after years of daily news about the euro crisis and after months of news about the popular uprising in the Ukraine against president Yanukovych, who had refused to sign the association agreement with the EU. This could have invited political parties to overcome the usual problem of low salience of EU iss…
Whose truth is it anyway? An experiment on annotation bias in times of factual opinion polarization
Information shapes citizens’ political decision-making. This process is amply studied by social scientists, for whom human annotation is a crucial instrument in their toolkit. Due to the democratization of data and the advances in NLP more data can be analyzed or classified, making these benchmarks more important than ever: An algorithm trained on biased data will reproduce and often exacerbate bias. Currently, disagreement and bias are often con…
Challenging the Global Cultural Conflict Narrative: An Automated Content Analysis on How PerPetrator Identity Shapes Worldwide News Coverage of Islamist and Right-Wing Terror Attacks
Recent terrorist attacks such as the Christchurch mosque attacks in 2019 renew the discussion of whether right-wing attacks are reported less negatively than Islamist attacks. To clarify this point, our study is the first to combine the selection of media inside and outside the West with a distinction between Islamist and right-wing attacks. We compare coverage given to thirty-two right-wing and forty Islamist attacks from 2015 to 2019 in nine We…
Advancing Automated Content Analysis for a New Era of Media Effects Research: The Key Role of Transfer Learning
The availability of individual-level digital trace data offers exciting new ways to study media uses and effects based on the actual content that people encountered. In this article, we argue that to really reap the benefits of this data, we need to update our methodology for automated text analysis. We review challenges for the automatic identification of theoretically relevant concepts in texts along three dimensions: format/style, language , a…
The Trouble with Sharing Your Privates: Pursuing Ethical Open Science and Collaborative Research across National Jurisdictions Using Sensitive Data
Open science and effective collaboration both require the sharing of data between researchers. This is especially true for computational methods, as the technical complexity and heterogeneous data sources often require collaboration between researchers in different institutions and jurisdictions. Many data sources, however, cannot be shared openly because of copyright law and contracts such as terms of service. These regulations can be complex, s…
Media and juvenile delinquency: A study into the relationship between journalists, politics, and public
Between 2007 and 2011, the number of registered juvenile suspects declined by 44 percent, but the Dutch public did not feel any safer. In this research, we study media coverage of youth crime and interview journalists and their sources in order to investigate the relationship between journalists, their sources, and the possible effects on the public with respect to fear of crime. We find an overrepresentation of youth crime in news coverage, espe…
Multiperspectival Normative Assessment: The Case of Mediated Reactions to Terrorism
This article provides a model for how communication phenomena can be normatively assessed using multiple normative perspectives simultaneously. We exemplify the procedure of multiperspectival normative assessment (MNA) using mediated reactions to terrorism as our case in point. We first identify the normative challenges related to the speed and substance of terrorism communication and the ways in which relations of solidarity are communicatively …
Subject–Object asymmetry in Dutch children’s comprehension of wie -questions
Preview this article: Subject–Object asymmetry in Dutch children’s comprehension of wie-questions, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/avt.18.18van-1.gif
Global Angling with a Local Angle: How U.S., British, and Dutch Newspapers Frame Global and Local Terrorist Attacks
The 9/11 terrorist attacks and later attacks such as those in London and Madrid shocked the world and found their way into the newspapers of many countries. The authors study the international coverage of these events in the context of globalization versus localization and the creation of the dominant post-cold war frame of the War on Terror. Using automatic co-occurrence analysis based on the notion of associative framing, they investigate wheth…
Good News or Bad News? Conducting Sentiment Analysis on Dutch Text to Distinguish Between Positive and Negative Relations
Many research questions in political communication can be answered by representing text as a network of positive or negative relations between actors and issues such as conducted by semantic network analysis. This article presents a system for automatically determining the polarity (positivity/negativity) of these relations by using techniques from sentiment analysis. We used a machine learning model trained on the manually annotated news coverag…
Parsing, Semantic Networks, and Political Authority Using Syntactic Analysis to Extract Semantic Relations from Dutch Newspaper Articles
Analysis of political communication is an important aspect of political research. Thematic content analysis has yielded considerable success both with manual and automatic coding, but Semantic Network Analysis has proven more difficult, both for humans and for the computer. This article presents a system for an automated Semantic Network Analysis of Dutch texts. The system automatically extracts relations between political actors based on the out…
Media logic in election campaign coverage
The media logic thesis holds that the content of political news is the product of news values and format requirements that media make use of to attract news consumers. This study tests whether three content characteristics – personalized, contest and negative coverage – manifest a single media logic by analysing whether they co-vary over time. It also tests the implicit assumption underlying the media logic thesis that media adhere to a single me…
Financial news and market panics in the age of high-frequency sentiment trading algorithms
Whether financial news may contribute to market panics is not an innocent question. A positive answer is easily used as a legitimation to limit the freedom of financial journalists. Long-term effects of news are moreover inconsistent with the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), which maintains that new information gives immediately rise to a new equilibrium. The EMH is under discussion, however, as a result of the transformation of financial marke…
Diverse politics, diverse news coverage? A longitudinal study of diversity in Dutch political news during two decades of election campaigns
Although diverse political news has been recognized as a requirement for a well-functioning democracy, longitudinal research into this topic is sparse. In this article, we analyse the development of diversity in election coverage in the Netherlands between 1994 and 2012. We distinguish between diversity for party and issue coverage, and look at differences between diversity in newspapers and television news. Results show that news diversity varie…
Relative Political and Value Proximity in Mediated Public Diplomacy: The Effect of State-Level Homophily on International Frame Building
This article applies the homophily thesis to public diplomacy and offers an empirical examination of a country's success in its mediated public diplomacy efforts. It analyzes international frame building, the process of creating or changing media frames in the international communications arena, by applying it to the case of Israeli mediated public diplomacy efforts during the war in Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009. The article claims that one wa…
News selection criteria in the digital age: Professional norms versus online audience metrics
On newspaper websites, journalists can observe the preferences of the audience in unprecedented detail and for low costs, based on the audience clicks (i.e. page views) for specific news articles. This article addresses whether journalists use this information to cater to audience preferences in their news selection choices. We analyzed the print and online editions of five national newspapers from the Netherlands with a mixed-method approach. Us…
Party Leaders in the Media and Voting Behavior: Priming Rather Than Learning or Projection
The prominence of party leaders in the media is one of the presumed causes of leader effects (i.e., the influence of party leader evaluation on the voting decision). Yet there is scant knowledge of the relationship between attention for party leaders in the news and the weight of party leader evaluations in the voting decision. This study fills this research gap by examining the effect of exposure to personalized coverage on the weight of party l…
Quantitative analysis of large amounts of journalistic texts using topic modelling
The huge collections of news content which have become available through digital technologies both enable and warrant scientific inquiry, challenging journalism scholars to analyse unprecedented amounts of texts. We propose Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling as a tool to face this challenge. LDA is a cutting edge technique for content analysis, designed to automatically organize large archives of documents based on latent topics, m…
The Impact of the Explosion of EU News on Voter Choice in the 2014 EU Elections
The European elections in 2014 were the first to be held after a long period in which EU-related news was prominent in the media. They were held after years of daily news about the euro crisis and after months of news about the popular uprising in the Ukraine against president Yanukovych, who had refused to sign the association agreement with the EU. This could have invited political parties to overcome the usual problem of low salience of EU iss…
A Gatekeeper among Gatekeepers: News agency influence in print and online newspapers in the Netherlands
This paper investigates the influence of news agency Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANP) on the coverage and diversity of political news in Dutch national newspapers. Using computational text analysis, we analyzed the influence on print newspapers across three years (1996, 2008, and 2013) and compared influence on print and online newspapers in 2013. Results indicate that the influence of ANP on print newspapers only increased slightly. Online n…
Media and juvenile delinquency: A study into the relationship between journalists, politics, and public
Between 2007 and 2011, the number of registered juvenile suspects declined by 44 percent, but the Dutch public did not feel any safer. In this research, we study media coverage of youth crime and interview journalists and their sources in order to investigate the relationship between journalists, their sources, and the possible effects on the public with respect to fear of crime. We find an overrepresentation of youth crime in news coverage, espe…
Text Analysis in R
Computational text analysis has become an exciting research field with many applications in communication research. It can be a difficult method to apply, however, because it requires knowledge of various techniques, and the software required to perform most of these techniques is not readily available in common statistical software packages. In this teacher’s corner, we address these barriers by providing an overview of general steps and operati…
Clause Analysis: Using Syntactic Information to Automatically Extract Source, Subject, and Predicate from Texts with an Application to the 2008–2009 Gaza War
This article presents a new method and open source R package that uses syntactic information to automatically extract source–subject–predicate clauses. This improves on frequency-based text analysis methods by dividing text into predicates with an identified subject and optional source, extracting the statements and actions of (political) actors as mentioned in the text. The content of these predicates can be analyzed using existing frequency-bas…
Studying Muslim Stereotyping through Microportrait Extraction
Research from communication science has shown that stereotypical ideas are often reflected in language use. Media coverage of different groups in society influences the perception people have about these groups and even increases distrust and polarization among different groups. Investigating the forms of (especially subtle) stereotyping can raise awareness to journalists and help prevent reinforcing oppositions between groups in society. Conduct…
Role-based Association of Verbs, Actions, and Sentiments with Entities in Political Discourse
A crucial challenge in measuring how text represents an entity is the need to associate each representative expression with a relevant entity to generate meaningful results. Common solutions to this problem are usually based on proximity methods that require a large corpus to reach reasonable levels of accuracy. We show how such methods for the association between an entity and a representation yield a high percentage of false positives at the ex…
When Communication Meets Computation: Opportunities, Challenges, and Pitfalls in Computational Communication Science
The recent increase in digitally available data, tools, and processing power is fostering the use of computational methods to the study of communication. This special issue discusses the validity of using big data in communication science and showcases a number of new methods and applications in the fields of text and network analysis. Computational methods have the potential to greatly enhance the scientific study of communication because they a…
Partial priming: How issue news shapes issue saliency, which shapes turnout but not the vote
The Combined Effects of Mass Media and Social Media on Political Perceptions and Preferences
Changes in political perceptions and preferences may result from the combined effects of news from various media. Estimating these combined effects requires the best possible, albeit different, measures of news obtained from self-selected mass media and social media that can be linked to panel survey data concerning perceptions and preferences. For the 2017 Dutch national elections, such data is available. Political perceptions and preferences ar…
The Unified Framework of Media Diversity: A Systematic Literature Review
How to study media diversity has become a major concern in today’s media landscape. Many expect that algorithmic filtering and a shift of audiences from legacy media to new intermediaries decrease the diversity of news diets, leading to fragmented societies, polarization and spread of misinformation. Different fields, from journalism research to law and computer science, are involved in the study of media diversity. They operate, however, with va…
Reproducible Extraction of Cross-lingual Topics (rectr)
With global media content databases and online content being available, analyzing topical structures in different languages simultaneously has become an urgent computational task. Some previous studies have analyzed topics in a multilingual corpus by translating all items into a single language using a machine translation service, such as Google Translate. We argue that this method is not reproducible in the long run and proposes a new method – R…
The Trouble with Sharing Your Privates: Pursuing Ethical Open Science and Collaborative Research across National Jurisdictions Using Sensitive Data
Open science and effective collaboration both require the sharing of data between researchers. This is especially true for computational methods, as the technical complexity and heterogeneous data sources often require collaboration between researchers in different institutions and jurisdictions. Many data sources, however, cannot be shared openly because of copyright law and contracts such as terms of service. These regulations can be complex, s…
Linking event archives to news: A computational method for analyzing the gatekeeping process
Digital archives that document real-world events provide new opportunities for large-scale analyses of how news coverage represents reality. We present a method and open-source tool for linking event data to news articles, and demonstrate its application with an analysis of event and country level predictors of terrorism coverage in The Guardian from 2006 to 2018, using event data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). Our method builds on est…
Computer Science (27 works) · Political science (23 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Media Studies and Communication (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · Social Media and Politics (16 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Artificial Intelligence (13 works) · Computational and Text Analysis Methods (13 works) · Law (13 works)