Description
There are many ways to approach the study of how North Korea is depicted in the media; this is why, at the beginning of our research project, we opted for the widest frame.
We investigated how the Eastern and Western media cover North Korea, in order to highlight critical points and patterns in the media and public opinion. Our main aim was to give the user a glimpse of what can be found on search engines and devices regarding the country.
We chose to focus on the press, videos, and books: three different media, with three different audiences and consumption modes, via different devices. Contents were not filtered: even non-relevant results were taken into account, as audiences will interact with them as well.
Protocol
We started from a broad query: “North Korea”, to avoid topic biasing. Relying on Google Trends (first question), we visualized the evolution of the topic over time and then we narrowed the timespan down to the last year, from November 2016 to November 2017.
Setting this timeframe, we explored Google and Baidu search engines, the former as a sample of US coverage, the latter for Chinese.
We then focused on Google News, YouTube, and Goodreads for the US, and on Baidu News, Baidu and Bilibili Videos, and Books for China. Using the exact same protocol for every device (with minor changes related to scraping tools and labeling – see the Protocol for more information) we labelled results according to the original rankings of each search engine, source, timestamp, and topic.
Finally, the resulting datasets were merged to create a visualization offering a general overview of North Korea’s depiction in the media.
Data
Timestamp: 11/2016 - 11/2017
Data source: Google News, Baidu News, Youtube,
Bilibili
Goodreads, Baidu Books
Download data (287KB)
We obtained 6 datasets: two for the news (Google News/Baidu News), two for the videos (YouTube/Bilibili) and two for the books (Goodreads/Baidu Books). Every dataset contains title, link, ranking, date and author or source of the content.