From newspaper supplement to data company: Tracking rhetorical change in the Times Higher Education’s rankings coverage
- Morten Hansen, Lancaster University & University of Cambridge
- Astrid Van den Bossche, King's College London
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This session will focus on the Times Higher Education (THE) magazine, publisher of the World University Rankings. It reports on the findings of a recent study that analyses a corpus of 3,296 rankings related articles printed in the magazine between 1994 and 2020. The analysis shows how coverage of the rankings is subject to shifts in rhetorical strategy as THE developed into a ranking powerhouse.
The analysis makes use of a computational hermeneutic application of Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad. The findings are presented by mapping prevalent themes in the corpus by using LDA topic modelling, identifying scene-agent ratios by examining the cast of frequent agents by scene, and articulating subject-verb-object triplets as dendrograms in order to approximate scene-agent-act ratios. The study is forthcoming in the journal Poetics.
Further reading: From newspaper supplement to data company: Tracking rhetorical change in the Times Higher Education’s rankings coverage
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Morten Hansen is a Research Associate on the Universities and Unicorns project at Lancaster University, and a PhD student at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. He specialises in education markets and has previously worked as a researcher at the Saïd Business School in Oxford.
Astrid Van den Bossche is a Lecturer at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Her research interests span across marketing history and theory, economic socialisation, and applications of computational methods in consumer culture.
