Metadata table for 350 images associated with 200 randomly-selected US print news stories about climate change

This file contains information for each of the images analyzed for:

Rebich-Hespanha, S., Rice, R.E., Montello, D.R., Retzloff, S., Tien, S., and Hespanha, J.P. (2015) Image Themes and Frames in U.S. Print News Stories about Climate Change, Environmental Communication, 9(4), 491-519. doi:10.1080/17524032.2014.983534.

The 350 images referenced in this data table (one image per row) appeared with 200 articles that were randomly sampled from among 5,637 image-containing newspaper and magazine stories about climate change that appeared in 11 US news source archives between the time each source first included any reference to climate change (earliest was 1969) and the date of data collection (September 2009). Sources were selected because they were associated with image metadata for at least some records, and were available on microfilm or as paper copy at the University of California, Santa Barbara library. Because this corpus was collected primarily for algorithmic text analysis, only English-language articles were included. 

Text stories were retrieved from the LexisNexis news database using a query for the subject terms ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’. Queries returned 14,910 stories about climate change, and, of those, 5,637 (37.8%) were associated with metadata indicating inclusion of one or more images. Candidate articles from this image-containing set were randomly selected, and the first author read each article and excluded (1) stories that mentioned climate change but were focused on an unrelated topic (e.g., referring to climate change or global warming when describing a ‘hot’ sports team), (2) stories that were about environment-themed topics (e.g., alternative energy, ‘green’ lifestyles, weather phenomena) but did not explicitly refer to climate change or global warming, (3) stories that briefly referred to climate change or global warming but provided only minimal information about the relationship between climate change and the main topic of the story, and (4) news summaries that included only brief information about multiple top stories of the day. Articles were selected iteratively until 200 articles met the selection criteria. Once image identity was determined through microfilm scans, all images that could be located via web search in high-quality digital format were acquired. All of the stories that were selected for the sample based on the presence of graphics metadata contained at least one image. The final data consisted of 350 images from 200 articles, which are listed in this table.

Information provided for each image includes the following (which are columns in the table):

 

imageNUM: unique number corresponding with each image

ImageID: unique alphanumeric ID that provides information about the article (beginning numeric digits) and sequence in article (following alphabetic and numeric characters)

publication date: date article and image(s) were published

headline: headline of the article with which the image(s) appeared

caption: caption (if any) that appeared with image

commissioned by (e.g. AP images, MCT direct): organization responsible for creating image; ni = no information

created by (name and occupation of photographer, journalist, scientist, etc.): person/people who created the image; ni = no information

data source (if applicable): source of data upon which image is based; ni = no information, na = not applicable (i.e., no data were used)

brief description: a basic description of the visual denotative elements of the image

ImageType_chart: if 1, image was classified as a chart

ImageType_illustration: if 1, image was classified as an illustration

ImageType_photo: if 1, image was classified as a photo

ImageType_diagram: if 1, image was classified as a diagram

ImageType_hedcut: if 1, image was classified as a hedcut (portrait created using stipple method of drawing, used by Wall Street Journal to present images of columnists)

ImageType_infographic: if 1, image was classified as an infographic

ImageType_map: if 1, image was classified as a map

ImageType_table: if 1, image was classified as a table