Research project: gathering data

The main data for my research project will come from newspapers. I started gathering articled from the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. I will also analyze data from the Wall Street Journal and other conservative newspapers. I have been doing searches on the topic of “government secrecy” looking at articles dating from 1992. One advantage of looking at articles dating back to 1992 is that I will be able to analyze the press discourse during two different presidential administrations, one democrat and the other republican. To limit my search, I’m concentrating on looking at editorials. This is because editorials will offer me a better perspective on the discourse about secrecy given that editorials are opinions about the topic, instead of just describing the news. In the case of the Chronicle of Higher Education, it will be useful because many of the articles include the opinions and perspectives from historians, political scientists and other researchers.

For what I have been looking so far, it seems data from the archives listserv and the records managers’ listserv will not be as useful as expected. This is because the vast majority of posts are just links to other news. So in this case I will use this for quantitative purposes to demonstrate one of my impressions that archivists and records managers are not engaged in discussions about the role of archives on government secrecy. So I think this part will lead me to present questions that should be addressed in the future, and that will need further qualitative research.

The aspect in which I’m struggling is on how I’m going to code the data. I’ll need to look for more information about this aspect of research.