Humanitarian News
Comparative research on how humanitarian issues are reported around the world
This collaborative project examines how news organisations around the world report humanitarian issues. It began by asking whether coverage is dominated by an “emergency imaginary”, which presents suffering as a sudden crisis requiring an immediate response. Our research combines computational text analysis with qualitative interpretation to compare reporting across countries, political systems and types of news organisation.
The project draws on a global corpus of more than one million English-language news articles mentioning humanitarian issues, published between 2010 and 2020. The corpus now supports further work on journalistic role performance and the framing of refugee issues. Open data, code and documentation allow other researchers to build on the project.
Research outputs
An analysis of coverage from 46 international news organisations across 21 countries examines how journalistic roles vary with topics, political systems and organisational settings.
The original study tests the reach of the “emergency imaginary” in humanitarian news, comparing patterns of reporting across a decade of global coverage.
Work in progress
This paper uses the corpus to examine how refugee issues are framed over time and across political and organisational contexts, combining topic modelling, network analysis and qualitative discourse analysis.
Data & replication materials
The open document-feature matrix contains word frequencies for 1,118,397 articles, with metadata on news sources, countries and publication dates. It is distributed in RDS format for use with R and quanteda. Full article texts are subject to copyright restrictions.
R scripts, processed data and documentation for reproducing the analysis, with a README and file structure guide. The code is also available on GitHub.
Awards
Funding & collaboration
The original corpus and project were supported by the Centre for Data, Culture & Society at the University of Edinburgh. Subsequent collaborative studies have also received support from the German Research Foundation (DFG, grant 539233881).
The collaboration brings together researchers working on humanitarian communication and computational methods, including Kate Wright, Christopher Barrie, Andrew Jones, Zhe Xu, Martin Scott and Shuai Wang, alongside the co-authors of the refugee framing study.
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