Using web archives for an explorative study of the web presence of German parties during the European election 2019

Florence Ertel (), Simon Donig, Markus Eckl, Sebastian Gassner, Daniel Göler and Malte Rehbein
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Florence Ertel: University of Passau
Simon Donig: University of Passau
Markus Eckl: University of Applied Sciences Fulda
Sebastian Gassner: University of Passau
Daniel Göler: University of Passau
Malte Rehbein: University of Passau

Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, 2024, vol. 58, issue 1, No 28, 603-625

Abstract: Abstract In the digital age, political science is faced with a shift of election campaigns and political discourse to digital or virtual arenas. Because the internet is a highly volatile medium and online content can become inaccessible after the campaign season, new challenges for research arise as well as the need for the preservation of online content. Moreover, the sheer volume of data researchers have to deal with has reached levels where traditional methods are being highly challenged. This paper puts forth a web harvesting workflow with a strong focus on granular extraction of unstructured information (publication dates) for automated analysis. As our approach is methodological, we would like to point out the benefits that researches in political science may draw from adapting our methodology. We demonstrate this by analysing an event-based web crawl of German parties participating in the election campaign for the European Parliamentary Election in 2019. We employ distant reading methods to generate topic models, which are subsequently evaluated by hermeneutic analysis of a subset of the data.

Keywords: Web archives; European parliamentary election; Second order elections; Distant reading; Topic modelling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1007/s11135-023-01654-3

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