New Media Cloud Video Tutorials

By Aashka Dave (Tutorial videos by Rahul Bhargava, Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, and Aashka Dave)

Back in June, we hosted a tutorial session on Media Cloud at ICWSM 2020. Since that event took place online, we recorded the tutorial sessions and are sharing the videos as a resource for anyone interested in learning more about Media Cloud research and our latest updates. You can find the entire playlist of videos on YouTube. If you’d prefer to choose which videos to watch and get a quick summary of each one, you can follow the embedded links in this post.

VIDEO #1: AN INTRODUCTION TO MEDIA CLOUD

This video provides an overview of why our team created Media Cloud and goes over what Media Cloud’s three tools — Explorer, Topic Mapper, and Source Manager — can be used for.

VIDEO #2: AN INTRODUCTION TO EXPLORER

This video takes users through Media Cloud’s Explorer tool, which helps quickly study media attention, language and entities in global news reporting online.

VIDEO #3: EXPLORER CASE STUDY

In this video, we go over a Media Cloud research project looking at the language used to cover immigration in U.S.-based newspapers from 2014–2018. You can read an overview of that study here, and download the full report here.

VIDEO #4: AN INTRODUCTION TO TOPIC MAPPER

In this video, we take users through the latest version of Topic Mapper, which now supports cross-platform research. You can also find a written guide to cross-platform research in Topic Mapper here.

VIDEO #5: TOPIC MAPPER CASE STUDY

This video takes viewers through our process for conducting cross-platform research using Topic Mapper. We present research conducted with the German Marshall Fund on mis/disinformative narratives about Greta Thunberg ahead of the global climate strikes in September 2019. This research project was used to inform how we designed and built cross-platform integrations into Topic Mapper.

VIDEO #6: USING THE MEDIA CLOUD API

Our last video provides an introduction to using the Media Cloud API. We take you through a set of Python3 Jupyter notebooks to help you understand how to use the API for your own media research and analysis.

We hope these tutorial videos are helpful for you, whether you’re just starting out with Media Cloud or you’ve been using the tools for years. If you have any other questions, feel free to visit our support page or contact us at support@mediacloud.org.