Hal Roberts and Ethan Zuckerman: "Media Cloud and Quantitative News Media Analysis"

Date:  Monday,  November 23, 2009
Time:  11:45am – 1:15pm
Place:  Maxwell Dworkin 119

Speakers:  Hal Roberts and Ethan Zuckerman

Title:  Media Cloud and Quantitative News Media Analysis

Abstract:  The rapid rise of participatory media technologies – weblogs, social networks, microblogging, video sharing sites – are transforming the news media landscape, reshaping how ideas are spread. Much of the early research on the influence of participatory media on existing institutions focuses on specific, successful cases where media frames developed online influenced offline media. Our project seeks to complement this work with tools to facilitate quantitative analysis of the relationship between media sources. We will present our prototype system to retrieve, tag, cluster and analyze blog and newspaper data, and discuss how the Media Cloud platform will be used in our future experiments, and can be used by other researchers to analyze patterns of influence in news media.