PoliMedia - Improving the Analyses of Radio & Newspaper coverage of Political Debates

Students of media and communication sciences study the role of media in our society. They frequently search through media archives to manually select items that cover a certain event. When this is done for large time spans and across media-outlets, this task can however be challenging and laborious. Therefore, up until now the focus of students has been on manual and qualitative analyses of newspaper coverage. PoliMedia aims to stimulate and facilitate largescale, cross-media analysis of the coverage of political events. We focus on the meetings of the Dutch parliament, and provide automatically generated links between the transcripts of those meetings, newspaper articles, including their original lay-out on the page, and radio bulletins. Via the portal at www.polimedia.nl students will be able to search through the debates and find related media coverage in two media-outlets, facilitating a more efficient search process and qualitative analyses of the media coverage. Furthermore, the generated links are available via a SPARQL endpoint, allowing quantitative analyses with complex, structured queries that are not covered by the search functionality of the portal, thus challenging the student to go across the academic borders and enter fields that previously have been neglected.