Studying News Use with Computational Methods

This repo contains the course materials for the methods module of the SEDS course “Studying News Use with Computational Methods” held by Lisa Merten and Julian Unkel, summer term 2021.

Sessions

Data Collection in R, Part I: Collecting Social Media Data (2021-05-10)

Collecting digital trace data from social media via API requests, API wrapper packages, Facepager, and social listening services.

• Slides: HTML / PDF
• Readings:
  • Bruns, Axel. 2019. „After the ‘APIcalypse’: Social Media Platforms and Their Fight Against Critical Scholarly Research“. Information, Communication & Society 22 (11): 1544–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1637447.
  • Puschmann, Cornelius. 2019. „An End to the Wild West of Social Media Research: A Response to Axel Bruns“. Information, Communication & Society 22 (11): 1582–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1646300

Data Collection in R, Part II: Collecting News Articles (2021-05-17)

• Slides: HTML / PDF
• Readings:
  • Grimmer, Justin, and Brandon M. Stewart. 2013. „Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts“. Political Analysis 21 (3): 267–97. https://doi.org/10.1093/pan/mps028.

Text Preprocessing in R (2021-06-14)

• Slides: HTML / PDF
• Readings:
  • Boumans, Jelle W., and Damian Trilling. 2016. „Taking Stock of the Toolkit. An Overview of Relevant Automated Content Analysis Approaches and Techniques for Digital Journalism Scholars“. Digital Journalism 4 (1): 8–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2015.1096598.

Text Analysis in R, Part I: Text Description, Word Metrics and Dictionary Methods (2021-06-21)

• Slides: HTML / PDF
• Readings:
  • Chan, Chung-hong, Joseph Bajjalieh, Loretta Auvil, Hartmut Wessler, Scott Althaus, Kasper Welbers, Wouter van Atteveldt, and Marc Jungblut. 2021. “Four Best Practices for Measuring News Sentiment Using ‘off-the-Shelf’ Dictionaries: A Large-Scale p-Hacking Experiment.” Computational Communication Research 3 (1): 1–27. https://doi.org/10.5117/CCR2021.1.001.CHAN.

Text Analysis in R, Part II: Topic Modeling (2021-06-28)

• Slides: HTML / PDF
• Readings:
  • Maier, Daniel, Annie Waldherr, Peter Miltner, Gregor Wiedemann, Andreas Niekler, Alexa Keinert, Barbara Pfetsch, et al. 2018. „Applying LDA Topic Modeling in Communication Research: Toward a Valid and Reliable Methodology“. Communication Methods and Measures 12 (2–3): 93–118. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2018.1430754.