An Automated Approach to Investigating the Online Media Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections

Bibliographic Data

ID12972192
AuthorsArno Scharl (0000-0001-5346-9521, MODUL University Vienna, corresponding author), Albert Weichselbraun (0000-0001-6399-045X, Vienna University of Economics and Business)
Year2008
Volume5
Issue1
Pages121-132
Publication date2008-07-14
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Information Technology & Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1933-169X • E-ISSN: 1933-1681
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/19331680802149582
OpenAlexW1964490738
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited22

This paper presents the U.S. Election 2004 Web Monitor, a public Web portal that captured trends in political media coverage before and after the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Developed by the authors of this article, the webLyzard suite of Web mining tools provided the required functionality to aggregate and analyze about a half-million documents in weekly intervals. The study paid particular attention to the editorial slant, which is defined as the quantity and tone of a Web site's coverage as influenced by its editorial position. The observable attention and attitude toward the candidates served as proxies of editorial slant. The system identified attention by determining the frequency of candidate references and measured attitude towards the candidate by looking for positive and negative expressions that co-occur with these references. Keywords and perceptual maps summarized the most important topics associated with the candidates, placing special emphasis on environmental issues

Business · Data science · Perception · Political science · Politics · Position (finance · Presidential election · Presidential system · Suite · Tone (literature · World Wide Web · Complex Network Analysis Techniques · Computer Science · Law · Psychology · Social Media and Politics · Web visibility and informetrics

Tools

Open DOISci-HubOpen Access