Strategies for Improving Semi-automated Topic Classification of Media and Parliamentary documents

Since 1995 the techniques and capacities to store new electronic data and to make it available to many persons have become a common good. As of then, different organizations, such as research institutes, universities, libraries, and private companies (Google) started to scan older documents and make them electronically available as well. This has generated a lot of new research opportunities for all kinds of academic disciplines. The use of software to analyze large datasets has become an important part of doing research in the social sciences. Most academics rely on human coded datasets, both in qualitative and quantitative research. However, with the increasing amount of datasets and the complexity of the questions scholars pose to the datasets, the quest for more efficient and effective methods is now on the agenda. One of the most common techniques of content analysis is the Boolean key-word search method. To find certain topics in a dataset, the researcher creates first a list of keywords, added with certain parameters (AND, OR etc.). All keys are usually grouped in families and the entire list of keys and groups is called the ontology. Then the keywords are searched in the dataset, retrieving all documents containing the specified keywords. The online newspaper dataset, LexisNexis, provides the user with such a Boolean search method. However, the Boolean key-word search is not always satisfying in terms of reliability and validity. For that reason social scientists rely on hand-coding. Two projects that do so are the congressional bills project (www.congressionalbills.org ) and the policy agenda-setting project (see www.policyagendas.org ). They developed a topic code book and coded various different sources, such as, the state of the union speeches, bills, newspaper articles etcetera. The continuous improving automated coding techniques, and the increasing number of agenda setting projects (in especially European countries), however, has made the use of automated coding software a feasible option and also a necessity

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

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 varies over time. Diversity for party types increased over time. We found no clear trend for diversity of issue dimensions. Compared to newspapers, television news is more diverse for party types but less diverse on issue dimensions. The question concerning whether these findings are an indicator of structural bias is discussed

How Combining Terrorism, Muslim, and Refugee Topics Drives Emotional Tone in Online News: A Six-Country Cross-Cultural Sentiment Analysis

This study looks into how the combination of Islam, refugees, and terrorism topics leads to text-internal changes in the emotional tone of news articles and how these vary across countries and media outlets. Using a multilingual human-validated sentiment analysis, we compare fear and pity in more than 560,000 articles from the most important online news sources in six countries (U.S., Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, and Lebanon). We observe that fear and pity work antagonistically—that is, the more articles in a particular topical category contain fear, the less pity they will feature. The coverage of refugees without mentioning terrorists and Muslims/Islam featured the lowest fear and highest pity levels of all topical categories studied here. However, when refugees were covered in combination with terrorism and/or Islam, fear increased and pity decreased in Christian-majority countries, whereas no such pattern appeared in Muslim-majority countries (Lebanon, Turkey). Variations in emotions are generally driven more by country-level differences than by the political alignment of individual outlets

Growth mindset and school burnout symptoms in young adolescents: the role of vagal activity as potential mediator

Experiencing school burnout symptoms can have negative consequences for learning. A growth mindset, the belief that human qualities such as intelligence are malleable, has previously been correlated with fewer school burnout symptoms in late adolescents. This might be because adolescents with a stronger growth mindset show more adaptive self-regulation strategies and thereby increasing resilience against academic setbacks. Here we confirmed in a sample of 426 Dutch young adolescents (11–14 years old; 48% female) that this relationship between growth mindset and school burnout symptoms holds after controlling for other potential predictors of school burnout symptoms such as academic achievement, school track, gender, and socio-economic status. Our second aim was to increase our understanding of the mechanism underlying the relation between mindset and school burnout, by measuring physiological resilience (vagal activity, a measure of parasympathetic activity, also known as heart rate variability or HRV) in a subsample (n = 50). We did not find any relation between vagal activity and growth mindset or school burnout symptoms, nor could we establish a mediating effect of vagal activity in their relation. In conclusion, we found evidence for a potential protective effect of a growth mindset on school burnout symptoms in young adolescents, but not for physiological resilience (vagal activity) as an underlying mechanism. The protective effect of growth mindset as confirmed in our younger sample can be leveraged in interventions to prevent increasing school burnout symptoms