Introduction
How do media cover political debates? Answering this question requires a cross-media analysis of the minutes of the political debates, newspaper articles & photos and radio bulletins. However, this type of research is currently laborious. You will need to go to a physical archive, or you can work with a multitude of online archives with different interfaces and limitations.
The PoliMedia project linked the minutes of the debates in the Dutch Parliament (Dutch Hansard) to the databases of historical newspapers and ANP radio bulletins to allow cross-media analysis of coverage in a uniform search interface.
PoliMedia is a CLARIN-NL project. It is a collaboration of the TU Delft and the Vrije Universiteit (development of Semantic Web of Dutch Hansard and media), the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision (development of the search user interface) and Erasmus University Rotterdam (projectleader & user research of historians and political communication researchers).
For more information on PoliMedia see the video below
When using PoliMedia, we request you to cite it as follows:
Kleppe, M., Hollink, L., Kemman, M., Juric, D., Beunders, H., Blom, J., Oomen, J., Houben, G.J. (2014), PoliMedia. Rotterdam: www.polimedia.nl
Live demo
Instructions
For each fragment from a single speaker in a debate, we extracted relevant information: the speaker, the date, important terms from its content and important terms from the description of the complete debate. This information was then combined to create a query with which we searched the archives of newspapers, radio bulletins and television programmes. Media items that corresponded to this query were retrieved and a link was created between the speech and the media item, creating a Semantic Web of Dutch Hansard and media coverage. This Semantic Web contains links from the Dutch Hansard to newspaper articles and radio bulettins. From evaluations it was found that there was a 62% recall and 75% precision.
For all instructions on how to use PoliMedia, see the screencast below:
For a Dutch written explanation, see the PoliMedia website.