A content analysis and comparison of typhoon news in early and recent periods based on the text-mining approach

Abstract

This study investigated early and recent news reports on typhoons and typhoon-related disasters released by United Daily News from the perspectives of language construction, core meanings, and reporting trends. This study collected news reports from January 1, 1986 to December 31, 1996, and from January 1, 2006 to December 31, 2016, representing early and recent news respectively. The study employed text mining and frame analysis methods and studied the “frame” difference of news media over the past three decades. An analysis of the language construction of the news reports revealed that, concerning the subject of social communication, recent typhoon reports often utilized opinions from different social “actors” to increase the conflicts and violations of norms and human rights. From early to recent period, it is found that news frame are transiting from the early “response to nature” to the recent “response to society”. The former focuses on the information transmission of natural disasters, while the latter expends the focus of attention to the whole society, including the role of experts, social systems, and the actions of individual or collective actors. We believed that the study provides verifiable empirical data, uses text mining methods to assist in detecting or searching target texts, automates the detection of topics, and finds out important keyword pairs, and hopes to serve as a reference for future applied data science methods in qualitative hybrid research.