Toward open computational communication science: A practical road map for reusable data and code

Computational communication science (CCS) offers an opportunity to accelerate the scope and pace of discovery in communication research. This article argues that CCS will profit from adopting open science practices by fostering the reusability of data and code. We discuss the goals and challenges related to creating reusable data and code and offer practical guidance to individual researchers to achieve this. More specifically, we argue for integration of the research process into reusable workflows and recognition of tools and data as academic work. The challenges and road map are also critically discussed in terms of the additional burden they place on individual scholars, which culminates in a call to action for the field to support and incentivize the reusability of tools and data

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 operations in a computational text analysis project, and demonstrate how each step can be performed using the R statistical software. As a popular open-source platform, R has an extensive user community that develops and maintains a wide range of text analysis packages. We show that these packages make it easy to perform advanced text analytics

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 established techniques for calculating document similarity, and we propose a novel strategy for fine-tuning parameters of the event matching algorithm that requires no manual coding. An online appendix is provided that documents all code to replicate our analysis and reuse our tools

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 proce- dure of multiperspectival normative assessment (MNA) using mediated reactions to ter- rorism 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 constructed in reacting to terrorism. We link these chal- lenges to four distinct normative theories that prioritize competing values for public dis- course (freedom, community values, empowerment of the marginalized or constructive debate). The resulting set of competing normative expectations, which help assess the performance of terrorism communication, are eventually translated into recommenda- tions for professional and non-professional communicators. In conclusion, we show how MNA can help ground empirical scholarship in firmer theoretical foundations while simultaneously demonstrating the usefulness of normative theory in analyzing a wide range of issues

The Negation Bias in Stereotype Maintenance : A Replication in Five Languages

Research on linguistic biases shows that stereotypic expectancies are implicitly reflected in language and thereby subtly communicated to message recipients. Research on the Negation Bias shows that the use of negations (e.g., not stupid vs. smart) is more pronounced in descriptions of stereotype-inconsistent compared with stereotype-consistent behaviors. This article reports a replication study of the original research conducted in Dutch, using newly developed materials, and in five different languages: English, Dutch, Hungarian, Finnish, and Serbian. The results validate the existence of the Negation Bias in all five languages. This suggests that negation use serves a similar stereotype-maintaining function across language families.Peer reviewe

Presenting news on social media: Media logic in the communication style of newspapers on Facebook

With the rising popularity of social media as news sources, a new common format element for presenting news has emerged: in addition to the classic headline, lead and picture, news organizations add a status message when they share their news articles on social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Based on media logic theory, we argue that the communication style of these messages is likely to be more interpersonal and subjective. To investigate this we used computational text analysis to compare status messages to headlines and leads, covering nine newspapers from the Netherlands and Flanders over a period of 2.5 years. We conclude that newspapers use status messages to add a subjective expression to news on social media, and call for research into how this takes shape and affects the audience.status: Published onlin

News through a social media filter: Different perspectives on immigration in news on website and social media formats

Social media have become important news sources, prompting news organisations to create social media accounts to publish news. This requires a medium-based translation, in which social media editors must remediate news—selecting and possibly re-interpreting content—to accommodate a different audience and format. In this study we investigate this remediation for the issue of immigration, comparing the news coverage of immigration on the website and Facebook page of various newspapers using a novel method, which combines qualitative interpretation with computational text analysis. As a result, we can study the news coverage of immigration of five newspapers over two years, and substantiate our observations with quantitative, empirical results. Our findings show that, while the overall portrayal of immigration is largely similar, there are some differences that could prove to be important, and require further elaboration.status: publishe

Social media gatekeeping: an analysis of the gatekeeping influence of newspapers' public Facebook pages

Due to the rising importance of social media platforms for news diffusion, newspapers are relying on social media editors to promote the distribution of their news items on these platforms. In this study, we investigate how much of an impact these social media editors really have, focusing on the impact of newspapers’ public pages on Facebook. Since the actions of individual users are not visible on many platforms due to privacy consideration, we propose a method that leverages time series of aggregated scores for total user engagement, which are available for various platforms. We use this method to study and compare the influence of Facebook pages for six newspapers from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Flanders, for all news items published over 2 weeks in 2017.status: publishe