Topic Modeling for Communication Research
Topic modeling is an unsupervised technique for discovering the latent themes that run through a large collection of documents, representing each document as a mixture of topics and each topic as a distribution over words. In communication research it surfaces the issues, frames, and themes in news archives, social media, and political text at a scale no manual reading can match, with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and the Structural Topic Model (STM) as the dominant variants.
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Sources
- Blei, D. M., Ng, A. Y., & Jordan, M. I. (2003). Latent Dirichlet allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3, 993–1022. link ↗
- Roberts, M. E., Stewart, B. M., Tingley, D., Lucas, C., Leder-Luis, J., Gadarian, S. K., Albertson, B., & Rand, D. G. (2014). Structural topic models for open-ended survey responses. American Journal of Political Science, 58(4), 1064–1082. DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12103 ↗
- Grimmer, J., & Stewart, B. M. (2013). Text as data: The promise and pitfalls of automatic content analysis methods for political texts. Political Analysis, 21(3), 267–297. DOI: 10.1093/pan/mps028 ↗
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Topic Modeling for Communication and Media Research. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/communication/topic-modeling-communication
Which method?
Set this method beside its closest kin and read them side by side — the library lays the books on the table; the choice is yours.
- Automated Content AnalysisCommunication↔ compare
- Dictionary-Based Text AnalysisCommunication↔ compare
- Semantic Network AnalysisCommunication↔ compare