How Trayvon Martin’s death became a national story about race: a new paper

My students Erhardt Graeff, Matt Stempeck and I have a new paper in First Monday, titled “The Battle for ‘Trayvon Martin’: Mapping a Media Controversy On- and Offline”. In it, we examine how the shooting of Trayvon Martin turned into a dominant story in the news media by examining blogs, newspapers, Twitter, television broadcasts, online petition signatures and other media. The paper is here, but Erhardt’s summary of the paper may be a helpful introduction (as the paper itself is pretty long.)

We had three goals in writing the paper: to understand how the tragic, but initially unheralded death of Trayvon Martin became a national debate on race; to document how different actors frame and reframe stories when they receive media attention; and to show the value of analyzing a single news story in a variety of different mediums. It follows on Benkler et. al.’s paper analyzing online conversations about SOPA/PIPA, using many of the same tools, but adding some new data sources, like Archive.org’s collection of closed captions of broadcast television.

This paper is an outgrowth of the work we’ve been doing on Media Cloud for several years, supported by the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundation and the Knight Foundation. There’s a pile of Media Cloud-related research coming out soon. The SOPA/PIPA and Trayvon papers show the utility of the tools we call “Controversy Mapper” for analyzing a specific issue or set of stories, while another set of tools (related to the Mapping the Globe and World According To projects from Catherine d’Ignazio and Rahul Bhargava) are launching later this spring. We owe huge thanks to Hal Roberts, David LaRochelle and the team at Harvard and MIT that has been building the infrastructure to make this work possible.

It’s really been a pleasure working with students who’ve been willing to put hundreds of hours into untangling a complex and important story. Hope what we’ve learned is useful to you.