Obama in Cuba: A ‘culturomic’ analysis of frames in digital news media content

This study uses computational methods associated with the growing field of ‘culturomics’ to examine frames produced by digital news media sources during American President Barack Obama’s visit to Cuba in March of 2016. Using a corpus of 192 newspaper articles, ngram frequencies, topic models, and semantic characteristics (sentiment polarity and subjectivity) are assessed to identify prospective frames. Articles published by Cuba’s Granma and the American New York Times are selected as cases for comparison to represent how differences in frames manifest across media environments. Results of this analysis highlight differences in how Obama’s visit to Cuba was framed in Granma, the Times, and across the remainder of the sample. These results affirm the utility of computational methods in the study of frames, as well as other aspects of digital media content.