with the concept of “ngrams,” they are word frequency tables in which the transcript of each broadcast is broken into words and for each 10 minute block of airtime a list is compiled of all of the words spoken in those 10 minutes for each station and how many times each word was mentioned.
How can researchers use this kind of data to understand new insights into radio news?
The graph below looks at pronoun whatsapp lead usage on BBC Radio 4 FM, comparing the percentage of words spoken each day that were either “Me” words are used more than twice as often as “we” words but look closely at February of 2020 as the pandemic began sweeping the world and “we” words start increasing as governments began adopting language to emphasize togetherness.
“We” (orange) vs. “Me” (blue) words on BBC Radio 4 FM, showing increase of “we” words beginning in February 2020 as progresses
Combined with the television news ngrams that I previously created, it is possible to compare how topics are being covered across television and radio.
The graph below compares the percentage of spoken words that mentioned since the start of this year across BBC News London (television) versus radio programming on BBC World Service (international focus) and BBC Radio 4 FM (domestic focus).