Dissertation
A Computational Analysis of the Framing of Mass Public Shootings
Committee Members:
Dr. James Alan Fox, Chair
Dr. Glenn Pierce
Dr. James Silver
Compared to other forms of violence, mass public shootings receive a disproportionate amount of political and media attention, contributing to a level of public fear of mass shootings that outpaces the actual risk of mass shooting victimization. My dissertation utilizes computational methods to examine how politicians frame mass public shootings, how the media communicate these frames, and finally, how the public understands these frames. For this work, I collected three unique digital datasets of political speeches, news articles, and Reddit posts about mass public shooting incidents form 2012-2022. In three interrelated papers, I analyze these data using BERTopic, an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that detects clusters of topics in a corpus of text documents.
Dr. James Alan Fox, Chair
Dr. Glenn Pierce
Dr. James Silver
Compared to other forms of violence, mass public shootings receive a disproportionate amount of political and media attention, contributing to a level of public fear of mass shootings that outpaces the actual risk of mass shooting victimization. My dissertation utilizes computational methods to examine how politicians frame mass public shootings, how the media communicate these frames, and finally, how the public understands these frames. For this work, I collected three unique digital datasets of political speeches, news articles, and Reddit posts about mass public shooting incidents form 2012-2022. In three interrelated papers, I analyze these data using BERTopic, an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that detects clusters of topics in a corpus of text documents.
