Online media such as news websites, blogs and social networks are fast becoming a primary source of information in many parts of Africa, overtaking radio and television. Despite this significant change in news consumption, our knowledge about digital news content from the continent is rather limited. One contributing factor is the lack of systematic archival services (both commercial and not-for-profit) of digital news content. This project begins to fill this gap by creating a database of online news in fifteen Sub-Saharan African countries, and by developing a free-to-use application that will provide access to pre-processed data in formats commonly used in computational text analysis. Access to these data could help answer questions across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, from linguistics, to media studies or political science.

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Full citation: Madrid-Morales, Dani; Lindner, Peggy; Periyasamy, Madhumitha, 2021, “Corpus of African Digital News from 1,200 Websites Formatted for Text Mining / Computational Text Analysis”, https://doi.org/10.18738/T8/UKJZ3E, Texas Data Repository, V1

Read a preprint of Who Set the Narrative? Assessing the Influence of Chinese Media in News Coverage of COVID-19 in 30 African Countries