In 2024, a group of students have delivered their master’s theses in the societally oriented programme “Digital Society and Global Citizenship”. This blog is one in a series devoted to the interdisciplinary studies which have been conducted in the framework of the EURIDICE project, and are all related to real world challenges, in which digital solutions are used in a design science – action research approach.
The research project by Lareb Fatima Ahmad, an international master student at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, who graduated, in November 2024, addresses the challenges related to discrimination of ethnic minorities in Norway, the country where she grew up.
Ahmad, L.F. (2024) The Islamic Elephant in the News Room – Using Natural Language Processing to Uncover Stereotypes of Muslims and Ethnic
Minorities in Norwegian News. Master Thesis, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam [pdf].
Laréb Fatima Ahmad investigated, using Natural Language Processing methods, if stereotyping of Muslims and ethnic minorities could be objectively detected in newspapers. For her research Fatima used as input data, newspapers from 2017 to 2019. The study — which could only be done with computational liguistic methods, given the large body of textual data — objectively shows a disproportionate reportage practice in Norwegian newspapers in which Muslims and ethnic minorities are described in ways that align with bias towards negative, discriminatory stereotypes.
Various studies have revealed that conventional news sources often create stereotypical or discriminatory impressions of ethnic minorities. In Norway, surveys conducted on Muslims and non-Muslims reveal that the Norwegian population sees news media as a significant source for this negative impression. However, to recent date, data-scientific research on how mainstream Norwegian news media writes about these minority groups was still absent.