Media Corpora, Text Mining, and the Sociological Imagination - A Free Software Text Mining Approach to the Framing of Julian Assange by three news agencies using R.TeMiS

In this paper, we introduce R.TeMiS, a free software solution aimed at exploring new dimensions in text mining with a particular focus on media framing analysis. R.TeMiS is especially designed to provide help in a) the automation of corpus construction and management procedures based on the use of large media content data bases, and b) the extension of the range of statistical tools available to social scientists exploring texts through R coding (one and two-way tables, time series, hierarchical clustering, correspondence analysis, geographical mapping…). A case study on the media framing of Julian Assange from January 2010 to December 2011 is conducted. It is based on the analysis of a corpus of 667 news dispatches published in English by the three top international news agencies: Agence France-Presse (AFP), Reuters and Associated Press (AP).