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Online coders, open codebooks: New opportunities for content analysis of political communication

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2019

Nicholas J. G. Winter Open the ORCID record for Nicholas J. G. Winter [Opens in a new window] ,
Adam G. Hughes  and
Lynn M. Sanders
Nicholas J. G. Winter*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, University of Virginia, S185 Gibson Hall, 1540 Jefferson Park Ave, Charlottesville, VA
Adam G. Hughes
Affiliation:
Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C.
Lynn M. Sanders
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, University of Virginia, S185 Gibson Hall, 1540 Jefferson Park Ave, Charlottesville, VA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Analyzing audiovisual communication is challenging because its content is highly symbolic and less rule-governed than verbal material. But audiovisual messages are important to understand: they amplify, enrich, and complicate the meaning of textual information. We describe a fully-reproducible approach to analyzing video content using minimally—but systematically—trained online workers. By aggregating the work of multiple coders, we achieve reliability, validity, and costs that equal those of traditional, intensively trained research assistants, with much greater speed, transparency, and replicability. We argue that measurement strategies relying on the “wisdom of the crowd” provide unique advantages for researchers analyzing complex and intricate audiovisual political content.

Keywords

automated content analysiscrowdsourcingpolitical communicationtext and content analysis
Type
Original Article
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , October 2020 , pp. 731 - 746
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2019

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Supplementary material: Link

Winter et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LWWGKY
Link
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Winter et al. supplementary material

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