Analysing media discourses

Higher Education in Nigerian public discourse

Yusuf Olaniyan, SWDTP-funded PhD researcher in Education at the University of Bath

This presentation will discuss the methodological approach and data analysis techniques used in my study of how higher education (HE) is constructed within Nigerian public discourse. The research combines media analysis with a discourse-historical approach (DHA) to explicate how HE is framed in Nigerian national news medias. It focuses specifically on the post-COVID period, and the introduction of the National Universities Commission’s (NUC) Core Curriculum and Minimum Academic Standards (CCMAS) polices. The study used 331 media articles from three major Nigerian news media (Punch, Daily Trust, and Daily Post), published between 2021 and 2022, which focused on the intersections of vocational education, entrepreneurship, skills training, and apprenticeship-like pathways in the context of HE reforms. Through a two-phase analytical process, the first phase involved a quantitative scan to map the frequency and thematic emphasis of HE discussions in the media, highlighting the economic framing of HE around employability and market-driven outcomes. The second phase employed DHA to visibilised the ideological functions of these discourses. It also investigates how HE policies were legitimized, how social actors were positioned, and how historical continuities were reproduced in the media. Through this methodology, the presentation will illustrate how media discourses serve both framing and gatekeeping functions to determining which perspectives on HE are amplified or marginalised. It will highlight the challenges of conducting discourse analysis on publicly available media data, as well as the methodological and theoretical benefits of combining quantitative content analysis with a qualitative DHA framework. This session will be useful for doctoral researchers like me and early-career researchers interested in media analysis, discourse studies, and the intersection of policy, education, and public opinion in national contexts.

How do social media influencers legitimise veganism on YouTube?

Adrianna Jerzierska, PhD researcher in Business Studies at the University of Bristol

In this presentation, I will outline the methodological framework used in my PhD project, which aims to understand how social media influencers have legitimised veganism over time, by analysing approximately 8,000 YouTube videos posted between 2014 and 2024.

During this workshop, I will discuss the computational theory construction and the qualitative techniques used to study the discursive legitimation strategies by which influencers mainstream veganism. The first phase of the analysis involves generating the Dynamic BERT topic model (DTM). BERT is a large language model (LLM) that performs language tasks, such as distilling clusters of documents with similar semantic topics. By incorporating temporal analysis of topics, researchers can effectively track lexical changes across topics, leading to a deeper understanding of discursive legitimacy over time. The second stage involves the qualitative interpretation of the machine output by adopting a qualitative content analysis of the videos to contextualise the discursive strategies used by online actors.

Given that BERT performs best with short texts compared to long and noisy YouTube video transcripts, this was a significant challenge to overcome. In this webinar, I will discuss the decisions made to work within these limitations, as well as provide a brief overview of the analytical framework, from querying and downloading videos using the YouTube API to discussing AI tools for converting large audio files into transcripts.

This session is part of the SWDTP Data Analysis Webinar Series. Visit the following link for further information and registration: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/swdtp/1956811