Programmable Insight: A Computational Methodology to Explore Online News Use of Frames

The Internet is a major source of online news content. Online news is a form of large-scale narrative text with rich, complex contents that embed deep meanings (facts, strategic communication frames, and biases) for shaping and transitioning standards, values, attitudes, and beliefs of the masses. Currently, this body of narrative text remains untapped due—in large part—to human limitations. The human ability to comprehend rich text and extract hidden meanings is far superior to known computational algorithms but remains unscalable. In this research, computational treatment is given to online news framing for exposing a deeper level of expressivity coined “double subjectivity” as characterized by its cumulative amplification effects. A visual language is offered for extracting spatial and temporal dynamics of double subjectivity that may give insight into social influence about critical issues, such as environmental, economic, or political discourse. This research offers benefits of 1) scalability for processing hidden meanings in big data and 2) visibility of the entire network dynamics over time and space to give users insight into the current status and future trends of mass communication.