Method of Automated Assessment of a Territorial Entity Image in the Media Discourse of a Foreign State

Abstract

The penetration of information technologies into all spheres of our life dictates new rules, so it is not advisable to conduct media research without the use of technological solutions. Every day there are not even hundreds, but thousands of new publications, and it is difficult to process the entire array of information with the help of human efforts alone. The article presents the results of testing a new method of analyzing the image of a territorial subject in the media discourse. A distinctive feature is the use of a convergence approach and the implementation of part of the research with the help of IT specialists. The proposed method consists of five stages. First of all, the semantic core of the study and the list of media are formed, then the data is transformed into a format suitable for the software. At the fifth stage, data is collected through the Google search engine using a specially developed program in Python. As a result of this method more than 220,000 articles were collected and processed during the period from 2012 to the end of 2018. The empirical material was analyzed according to the following criteria: a) the patters of publication; b) the frequency of mentioning certain words; c) the field (politics, culture, sports, etc.). The methodology is suitable for further research while there are several points to be addressed in future studies. Among them, we suggest to limit the semantic core of the research using the word "Russia". For the intonation analysis of articles it is necessary to develop a specialized matrix; in addition, it is planned to identify the research time periods in more detail, which will allow us to assess the patterns of publication at a deeper level. In the future, the use of this methodology in media studies will increase the number of empirical databases and foster further research.