CogMedia.|

Investigating the mind-media connection

Welcome to the Cognition and Media (CogMedia) project, where you'll find aggregation and analysis of newsfeeds from major media headlines. Our research goal is to link cognition in news consumers to large-scale trends in media. Hosted by the Communicative Mind Laboratory in the Department of Communication at UCLA. CogMedia includes a large open database, and you can get lots of data for free through our code initiative, allowing you to import straight into R.

Data science + NLP.

Use a free function library, learn some tricks in R.

Browse headlines.

Peruse the database using our public interface.

Research approach.

Our research approach can be called "cognitive analytics." Think of how consumers read the news. It's literally mental. We are testing the hypothesis that subtle but measurable cognitive factors are useful in understanding what consumers read and share. These cognitive factors include subtle aspects such as accessibility, comprehensibility, and even bias. Subtle aspects of human mental processing could help us to understand media data, from the level of individual consumers, to more collective levels, such as the distribution of news themes, perhaps even the behavior of major newsmedia.

We are developing cognitive metrics based on newsmedia headlines, such as how simplified or complex a news story's language is, or how recognizable a recent story might be to a reader. The CogMedia project aims to bridge these cognitive metrics to broader collective patterns seen in newsmedia stories. What predicts a story's becoming viral? What explains the thematic patterns in news stories? How do cognitive variables relate to partisanship and controversy, in the manner that stories are composed and disseminated?

Working papers.

The Co-Mind Laboratory uses the CogMedia database to conduct specific research projects, linking cognitive processes to newsmedia consumption and social media metrics. We will share active research projects here through working papers.

Dale, R. (2020, August 6). The CogMedia project: Open data and tools for linking cognitive science and mass media. OSF Preprints. doi: 10.31219/osf.io/z69ta.

Luna, J. M., Alegria, O., & Dale, R. (2020, July 31). Cognitive fluency and the spread of news on social media. Poster presented at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Team.

Rick Dale
PI, coder. Faculty @ UCLA, Department of Communication

Sofia Cervantes
UX consultant. BS, Cognitive & Information Sciences, UC Merced

Jason Luna
Researcher, cognition. Current undergraduate @ UCLA

Jess Yerkes
Researcher, networks. BA, Communication, UCLA

Code + data.

CogMedia's core dataset is available in its entirety. A release of this dataset is conducted a few times a year. Click here for the current version. To get you started processing these data, the documentation for the function library is on GitHub here:

https://github.com/racdale/cogmedia

With the function library, you can quickly process CogMedia batches inside R. The result is a data frame over which you can apply your favorite tools (tidyverse, etc.). Illustrations are on the GitHub repository above.

Each story is based only on the RSS feed of the news item. We obey all copyright rules of the news source. However we tag news stories with a variety of information from social media metrics. Each story record includes:

  • source News organization (e.g., New York Times).
  • title Title of the story.
  • description Text associated with story description in RSS.
  • alexa_rank An Alexa rank of the source.
  • partisanship A partisanship score, based on AllSides.com.
  • social_score An approximate rate of Twitter sharing shortly after story release.
  • url Full URL to the story's source.

Our database contains...
1,474,063
news stories, since mid 2019.

Past week of stories, by source...

ABC News
200
BBC
192
Boston Globe
25
Boston Herald
430
Chicago Tribune
89
CNN
458
Daily Beast
204
Fortune
165
LA Times
344
NBC News
273
New York Times
343
NPR
164
NY Post
365
Reason.com
39
Reuters
1,123
ScienceDaily
14
The Atlantic
69
The Economist
10
The Federalist
66
The Independent UK
1,536
The Nation
51
USA Today
358
Washington Post
51
Washington Times
177