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March 11, 2009, 02:21 PM ET
Harvard Unveils Web Tool for Studying Media Trends
There’s a lot of debate over the state of the news media these days, but a team of researchers at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society is trying to make discussions of content and bias a bit more precise.
This morning, the Berkman Center unveiled Media Cloud, a research tool that designers say will help researchers study news-media trends with a level of quantitative precision previously unavailable. Powered by software that automatically identifies various elements — such as people, places, and topics — contained within an article, Media Cloud allows users to query a database of online content from more than 1,500 blogs and traditional publications.
Currently, three query tools are available to researchers: viewing the top 10 topics a news-media source covers, mapping how much news-media coverage individual countries receive from various publications, and viewing the top 10 topics associated with a given topic in a certain publication — for example, tracking what terms are most often associated with “Iran” in The New York Times’s coverage.
Ethan Zuckerman, a Berkman Center fellow, said that the inspiration for the project came from a discussion that he and a colleague had over the blogosphere’s coverage of international issues — neither could substantiate his viewpoints with broad-brush data.
“We realized … that the stories about citizen media and mainstream media and what each is good at have a lot to do with anecdote,” he said. “There’s not a lot of hard data behind it.”
More tools are in development, Mr. Zuckerman said, and Media Cloud is being offered open-source so that other researchers can develop tools of their own.
What have researchers already discovered? Running a preliminary test of the system a few months ago, Mr. Zuckerman and his colleagues found that Fox News’ Web site had “Hitler” as one of the 10 terms most closely associated with “Zimbabwe.” The culprit, Mr. Zuckerman said, was a series of columns posted on the site comparing President Robert Mugabe to Adolf Hitler.—David Shieh
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