Open Research across Disciplines

How the principles of open research can be applied to your discipline

Media and Communication

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Case Studies

Pending

Examples of open research practices

Open Data: OPTED (https://opted.eu/) is a design study that lays the foundation for an infrastructure that will serve a major hub for political text analysis in Europe. The EU-funded H2020 project involves 17 research institutions organized in 10 work packages which collaboratively work on designing the building blocks of the infrastructure. Among the objectives of the infrastructure are scientific community building, the extension of text analysis tools, and learning materials for social scientists, the broader public and journalists. For example, the Legislative Text Corpora Inventory (https://opted.eu/results/inventories/) aims to provide a comprehensive, easy-to-use collection of legislative speeches and legislative documents covering all EU member countries, the most important EU institutions, as well as the United Kingdom and Israel.

Open Methods: The Mediated Contestation in Comparative Perspective Project (MedCon) is a large-scale research project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) that has published an documentation of all methods used in producing and analysing the data underlying various project outputs. The documentation is available online and open access (https://medcon-doc.github.io/) and provides extensive and detailed information about Media/Case Selection, Text-Data Collection, Item Selection from the full corpus of collected texts and the content-analysis methods applied to study the selected items.

Resources

General Resources

  • Dienlin, T., Johannes, N., Bowman, N. D., Masur, P. K., Engesser, S., Kümpel, A. S., Lukito, J., Bier, L. M., Zhang, R., Johnson, B. K., Huskey, R., Schneider, F. M., Breuer, J., Parry, D. A., Vermeulen, I., Fisher, J. T., Banks, J., Weber, R., Ellis, D. A., … de Vreese, C. (2021). An agenda for open science in communication. Journal of Communication, 71(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqz052
  • Lewis, N. A., Jr. (2020). Open communication science: A primer on why and some recommendations for how. Communication Methods and Measures, 14(2), 71–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2019.1685660
  • Perreault, G., & Dienlin, T. (in press). Normalizing open science practice: Understandings, evaluations, and implementations of open science practices in the field of communication. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/10776990241262346
  • van Atteveldt, W., Strycharz, J., Trilling, D., & Welbers, K. (2019). Toward open computational communication science: A practical road map for reusable data and code. International Journal of Communication, 13, 3935–3954. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/10631

Open Methods

  • GitHub. (n.d.). GitHub. GitHub. https://github.com/
  • Github (https://github.com/): Software developer platform used especially by computational communication scientists for open sharing of data and software/code

Open Data

  • OSF. (2019). Osf.io. https://osf.io/
  • Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/): Transdisciplinary research data repository used by many media and communication researchers
  •  Harvard Dataverse. (n.d.). Dataverse.harvard.edu. https://dataverse.harvard.edu/
  • Harvard Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/): Transdisciplinary research data repository used by many media and communication researchers
  • Gruber, J. B., van Atteveldt, W., & Welbers, K. (2023). Sharing is caring (about research): Three avenues for sharing (copyrighted) text collections and the need for non-consumptive research (7.6). OPTED: Observatory for Political Texts in European Democracies. https://opted.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/k_opted/OPTED_Deliverable_D7.6.pdf
  • Ha, L. (2016). Why reviewing manuscripts for JMCQ and posting full research materials online are smart things to do. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 93(1), 5–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699016630320
  • Kim, Y., & Nah, S. (2017). Internet researchers’ data sharing behaviors: An integration of data reuse experience, attitudinal beliefs, social norms, and resource factors. Online Information Review, 42(1), 124–142. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-10-2016-0313
  • Mancosu, M., & Vegetti, F. (2020). What you can scrape and what is right to scrape: A proposal for a tool to collect public Facebook data. Social Media + Society, 6(3), Article 205630512094070. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120940703

Open Outputs

Open Education

  • Collaborative and continuously updated open-access book on access to APIs for collection of text and other online data
  • Bauer, P. C., Landesvatter, C., & Behrens, L. (Eds.). (2022). APIs for social scientists: A collaborative review. https://bookdown.org/paul/apis_for_social_scientists/