In this webinar on October 21, media researcher Berrie van der Molen will talk about the methodological approach – the ‘leveled approach’ – he used writing his dissertation ‘Talking XTC: Drug discourse in post-war Dutch newspaper and radio debates’. 

Digitizing radio tapes at the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision.

Earlier this year, Berrie van der Molen defended his dissertation, which consists of four analyses of the historical reputation of drugs that give insight into the developments and dynamics in post-war drug discourse in Dutch newspaper and radio debates. The thesis also follows a journey along the conceptualization and application of the leveled approach, a structural methodological approach for public debate analysis of digitized print and audiovisual data archives.

This webinar will focus on this methodological journey, while presenting examples from the ecstasy case study. Van der Molen will show how he combined analysis of Optical Character Recognition enriched newspaper data with analysis of Automatic Speech Recognition enriched radio data.

This research is part of research project Imperative of Regulation.

Read more on Van der Molen’s dissertation in this interview.