Research Project

I’m a research assistant at the Digital Political Inequality Lab at UCSB.

In spring 2022, my team of undergraduate research assistants reviewed literature and news articles on political expression to assess questions of normative frames in the media and relevant actors using social media for politics via human content analysis and computational methods in R. We wanted to analyze how the normative framing of the political use of social media in American newspapers has shifted from 2000 to 2020. The assumption is that media coverage of the political use of social media has shifted from a utopian lens to a dystopian one, suggesting a limited extent to which individuals adopt these new technologies and the agency and power these technologies hold in the political sphere. For the past 8 weeks, Dr. Dan Lane, the lab director, developed a list of coding schemes for the research assistants to analyze, e.g., questions of what normative frames were being used, whether the article mentioned government regulation or social media moderation as a solution to a problem on social media, and the actors involved in social media for politics.

The final coding schemes can be found in the image attached below. There were over 200 paragraph texts to code from various news organizations, including The Washington Post, Business Insider, and New York Times.