Humanities and Social Sciences
SPuDisc
Searching public discourse
Advancing media history by transparent automatic genre classification
This project studies how genres in newspapers and television news can be detected automatically using machine learning in a transparent manner. This will enable us to capture the often hypothesized but, due to the highly time consuming nature of manual content analysis, largely understudied shift from opinion-based to fact-centred reporting. Moreover, we will open the black box of machine learning by comparing, predicting and visualizing the effects of applying various algorithms on heterogeneous data with varying quality and genre features that shift over time. This will enable scholars to do large-scale analyses of historic texts and other media types as well as critically evaluate the methodological effects of various machine learning approaches.
This project brings together expertise of journalism history scholars (RUG), specialists in data modelling, integration and analysis (CWI), digital collection experts (KB & NISV) and e-science engineers (eScience Center). It will first use a big manually annotated dataset (VIDI-project PI) to develop a transparent and reproducible approach to train an automatic classifier. Building upon this, the project will generate three outcomes:
Searching public discourse
Pillarization and depillarization tested in digitized media historical sources
A new approach to the history of parliamentary communication and discourse
Text-induced corpus correction and lexical assessment tool
Are you a researcher who could benefit from our eScience skills and experience? Reach out to us today and let’s explore how we can work together.
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