Analysing Media Coverage of political debates by automatically generated links to Radio & Newspaper Items

Students and researchers 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 researchers has been on manual and qualitative analyses of newspaper coverage. PoliMedia aims to stimulate and facilitate large-scale, 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 researchers can search through the debates and find related media coverage in two mediaoutlets, facilitating a more efficient search process and qualitative analyses of the media coverage. Furthermore, the generated links are available via a SPARQL endpoint at data.polimedia.nl 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.