We Present Meteor — New Service for Media Text Data

09.08.2022

CCL members are involved in the OPTED design study, where they develop an infrastructure for researchers using text data. The OPTED team is happy to present Meteor, the inventory for media texts, as timely resource for text analysts.

Meteor (meteor.opted.eu) is an inventory that helps text analysts to obtain detailed information on European news sources. It covers various distribution channels such as print or social media channels, media organisations, and links data access options that are useful for gathering the related text data.

The now published research note in the European Journal of Communication describes the overall context of the inventory. The authors Paul Balluff, Fabienne Lind, Hajo Boomgaarden, and Annie Waldherr describe the motivation for the inventory, the selection procedure that was developed to screen relevant news sources, and the importance of certain filter categories.

The first version of Meteor (Media Texts Open Repository) was launched in 2021. Since then, the OPTED team of WP3 have continuously updated and expanded it to now include 1,500 news sources from 17 countries, as well as over 300 organisations, and 17 full-text data archives. Anyone is invited to register as a contributor to help further the expansion of the inventory. Quality is assured through a review process that screens entries before they are added to the registry. Meteor is developed in Python with Flask and the graph database DGraph as the backend. The development is open source and available on GitHub.

The inventory can also be integrated into the classroom. For example, the authors provide teaching materials for a course on “Hybrid Media Systems in Comparative Perspective” on the inventory website.

Work on the inventory and the overall OPTED infrastructure will continue. New features, as well as additional entries, are planned for the months to come.

Publication:

  • Balluff, P., Lind, F., Boomgaarden, H. G., & Waldherr, A. (2022). Mapping the European media landscape – Meteor, a curated and community-coded inventory of news sources. European Journal of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1177/02673231221112006

Link to Meteor: https://meteor.opted.eu/
Link to GitHub Repository: https://github.com/opted-eu/wp3inventory
Link to Teaching Material: https://meteor.opted.eu/guides/teaching-materials

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