Search

Aims This paper analyses the content of news media messages on drinking during pregnancy in Australia over an 18-year period to understand whether and how the nature of messages communicated to women has changed over time. Methods Factiva was used to search Australian newspapers from 2000 to 2017, resulting in a sample of 1394 articles from the 18 major national and state-based newspapers. Content analysis of articles was undertaken, and Poisson regression analysis was used to assess changes over time. Results The largest number of articles on drinking during pregnancy was published in 2007. Themes that significantly increased over time included Harms to the Child (from 0.97% in 2008 to 29.69% in 2015) and Prevention Initiatives (from 0% in 2005 to 12.50% in 2017). Articles endorsing women not consuming alcohol during pregnancy significantly increased over time (from 20.69% in 2001 to 53.78% in 2013), matched by a decreasing trend in the proportion of articles presenting mixed advice (from 15.93% in 2009 to 0% in 2017). The largest number of articles adopted no position in relation to women's consumption. Conclusions A stronger abstinence message during pregnancy has been communicated through Australian newspaper media over time. The mixed messaging and large number of articles not endorsing a position on consumption may reflect the inconclusiveness of the evidence on harms from low to moderate levels of alcohol consumption during pregnancy. Opportunities remain for researchers to work with public health advocates to disseminate balanced messages based on evidence-based research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2005, the National Library of Australia (NLA) began a pilot project to selectively digitize back issues of major Australian newspapers to provide free public access to over 60 million digitized newspaper articles, dating from the first years of Australian colonization to the early 1960s. Trove, a faceted search engine maintained by NLA, provides access to this very large collection. Unfortunately, Trove lacked any means to filter by location, which raised the tantalizing possibility of using advanced computational techniques to identify long-term patterns and trends in newspaper reportage of people, events, concepts, and many other historical entities. PaperMiner, which utilizes text mining techniques for extracting metadata information, was developed that enabled the inclusion of geolocations of the places cited in the newspaper articles and supported the searching of articles by location and visualizing the results of searches using both location and time using a map of Australia. Using PaperMiner, researchers could see when and where the anti-Chinese leagues movement started in Australia and how it spread, to better focus their subsequent research. PaperMiner can be used as a digital humanities tool to assist in research by replacing the tedium of a shallow scan through thousands of Trove search results with a more efficient method that draws the researchers' attention to more significant times and places where their time can be better spent in deeper analysis. In this article, we describe the techniques utilized in creating PaperMiner and discuss its usability testing with a group of leading researchers in Australian history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]