The Benefits of Using Dictionaries in Computational Communication Science

How to measure racism in news media is the main question in today's episode. Ahrabhi Kathirgamalingam looks into racist and discriminative language as well as dynamics of racism in some 30 years of German-speaking news media. As that's quite a lot of data, of course Ahrabhi also builds on CCS methods. Yet, in addition to the mere amount of data, coding racism also bears big questions of validity and ethics for coders and annotators -- an issue where CCS might also be able to help. In this episode hosted by Jana Bernhard, Ahrabhi talks us through dictionaries and the many options to construct and validate dictionaries in this area. Her research is part of her PhD project about which she is happily reachable via [email protected]. Also, some results were presented at the 2023 ICA in Toronto. Oh, and if you want to guest or host a future episode, please don't hesitate reaching out to us.