Source code and data set that analyzes headlines for book entitled Outliars.
Outliars considers how headlines of the Trump era negotiated the fact of lying. It takes as its data set a 28-year archive of headlines* from The New York Times, arguably the most popular coverage of U.S. politics in the last four years.
By comparing recent coverage to historical coverage, the book looks at how the transition from print to digital has influenced the quantity and types of content that are published in The New York Times. This includes a tabulation of Trump coverage compared to past presidents—dating back to Bill Clinton when the Times’s website was first introduced.
These scripts are used to calculate:
- the difference in volume of headlines for each president
- the balance between opinion and news stories during each presidency
- the average word counts per headline over the last 24 years
- other trends in the kinds of tokens used in relation to SEO strategies.