Abstract

Although socio-culturally and linguistically close, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark chose different measures to confront the COVID-19 pandemic: Denmark and Norway quickly imposed lockdowns, while Sweden largely avoided imposing government prohibitions.

This talk reports on in-progress research on the Scandinavian media landscape during the Covid-19 era, conducted as part of the HOPE Project (How Democracies Cope with Covid-19: A Data-Driven Approach). Using Danish newspaper data, we combine latent variable modeling and information theory to show how legacy media respond to a catastrophe that has both social and natural factors. And using a nearly comprehensive sample of Twitter data from all three countries from April-June, we model variation in topical and sentiment patterns aligned with the epidemic's progression and government policy interventions. 

About the speaker

Rebekah Baglini, Assistant Professor