DReAM: Debate Research Across Media on drugs and regulation

We are in the process of studying the role of historical public debates on drugs and regulation (1945-1990) in newspapers, on radio and television. These debates are shifting in time and often fragmented since drugs (e.g. heroin, amphetamines and cannabis) move between medical, criminal and recreational spheres. We study the historically dynamic relation between governmental drug regulation and public discourse. To do that, we aim to enable our research strategy, which is to trace and understand public debates by alternating between distant reading and close reading, across textual and AV-datasets.

AVResearcherXL is primarily developed as a distant reading tool with a focus on media representation research. By enriching the AVResearcherXL tool with additional CLARIAH components we have made it suitable for alternating cross-media forms of distant and close reading. This significantly improves the employability of AVResearcherXL for humanities researchers.