Digital Humanities Webinar: Talking XTC – Distant and close reading of digitized newspaper and radio data archives

Interested in using digital humanities methods in media archives? During this webinar on Friday October 21, media researcher Berrie van der Molen will talk about the ‘leveled approach’ he has used for his dissertation on the use of the term ecstasy in the public debate in the Dutch media since the 1980s.

For this research Van der Molen combined the analysis of Optical Character Recognition enriched newspaper data with the analysis of Automatic Speech Recognition enriched radio data. Using this methodological approach, he discovered, among other things, that ecstasy in the public debate had a very different connotation on the radio than in newspapers; the references ranged from ‘innocent party drug’ to ‘criminal merchandise’.