Tracking discourse and qualitative document analysis

New information bases pose challenges and opportunities for researchers seeking to enhance content analysis and chart cultural shifts using public documents such as newspapers and magazines. A qualitative approach to media analysis is combined with a specific application, 'tracking discourse', to demonstrate how research questions can be transformed into a research design that permits rich textual interpretive and thematic analysis, as well as provide quantitative information about trends and emphases over time, across media, and across topics. Materials from an ongoing project on the 'discourse of fear' illustrate a shift in major American newspapers' coverage toward more extensive use of crime, fear, and victim. Implications for cultural researchers are discussed.