Text data mining on current newspaper articles from the United States with ProQuest TDM Studio

Abstract

AbstractThis paper introduces and reviews a novel digital resource and service that offers access to a wealth of newspaper data from the United States for Text Data Mining (TDM) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Due to copyright restrictions, gaining access to relevant text corpora of this sort can be difficult. However, ProQuest TDM Studio and similar services provide researchers with access to data and resources that were previously unavailable for TDM to this extent. By using these tools, researchers can gain insights into current newspaper discourses that still have a tremendous impact on debates in society and on political decisions.After giving an account of the structural and procedural elements that are of relevance for TDM research projects when working with data providers, the paper describes the newspaper data that ProQuest TDM Studio makes available and reviews the ways in which this data can be examined via the tools that ProQuest TDM Studio’s research environment offers. After contrasting this setup with other data providers and their systems, the paper concludes with an analysis of the opportunities and challenges of working with data providers and research environments such as those provided by ProQuest TDM Studio.