Exploring Media Depiction of “Social Distancing” during COVID-19 using Topic Modeling and Word Correlation

August 31, 2021  |  Vol.7, No.8  |  PP. 357-366  | PDF

AUTHORS:

Eun-Ho Yeo, Communication and Media Studies, Plymouth University, USA

Kyung-Woo Park, Media and Communication, Dong-A University, Korea

Daniel Lee, Business, Plymouth University, USA

KEYWORDS:

COVID-19, Korea Herald, Korea Times, Social Distancing, Framing, Media, News

Abstract

This study examined how English-language newspapers in South Korea depicted “social distancing” during the COVID-19 pandemic, using text mining techniques such as word-correlation analysis and topic modeling. The data consisted of 2,463 news articles published from January 20, 2020 to January 13, 2021 in the two major English-language newspapers in South Korea - The Korean Times and The Korea Herald. For analysis, the researchers extracted sentences that contained “social distancing” to make a corpus. The corpus contained 4,566 sentences. For topic modeling analysis, this study used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LAD) which views each document as a mixture of topics, then considers each topic a mixture of words. The word-correlation was calculated at the sentence-level, not at the article-level. In other words, the correlation values between “social distancing” and other words were calculated based on how frequently “social distancing” and the words co-occurred in the same sentences. In the analysis, the data was grouped according to five time-periods that were proposed by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) based on the major changes in COVID-19 situations. Results indicated that media coverage related to “social distancing” focused on two distinctive topics: “spread and prevention” and “social impact.” Also, the word-correlation analysis showed that “social distancing” was more associated with “spread and prevention” than with “social-impact” of the pandemic. The findings of the study suggest a couple of implications: (1) The paradoxical social meaning of “social distancing” is apparent in the media depictions of COVID-19 (2) The media depiction of “social distancing” needs to provide more in-depth interpretations of “social distancing” concerning its impact on society.

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Citations:

APA:
Yeo, E.-H., Park, K.-W., Lee, D. (2021). Exploring Media Depiction of “Social Distancing” during COVID-19 using Topic Modeling and Word Correlation. Asia-pacific Journal of Convergent Research Interchange (APJCRI), ISSN: 2508-9080 (Print); 2671-5325 (Online), FuCoS, 7(8), 357-366. doi: 10.47116/apjcri.2021.08.33

MLA:
Yeo, Eun-Ho, et al. “Exploring Media Depiction of “Social Distancing” during COVID-19 using Topic Modeling and Word Correlation.” Asia-pacific Journal of Convergent Research Interchange, ISSN: 2508-9080 (Print); 2671-5325 (Online), FuCoS, vol. 7, no. 8, 2021, pp. 357-366. APJCRI, http://fucos.or.kr/journal/APJCRI/Articles/v7n8/33.html.

IEEE:
[1] E.-H. Yeo, K.-W. Park, D. Lee “Exploring Media Depiction of “Social Distancing” during COVID-19 using Topic Modeling and Word Correlation.” Asia-pacific Journal of Convergent Research Interchange (APJCRI), ISSN: 2508-9080 (Print); 2671-5325 (Online), FuCoS, vol. 7, no. 8, pp. 357-366, August 2021.

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