Representations of Disability in a Large Norwegian News Corpus: A Topic Modeling Approach Informed by Critical Discourse Studies

In this study, we examine how people with disabilities are framed in news media discourse in the early 21st century. Using Norway as a case study, we compiled articles from nationwide newspapers from the years 2005 and 2019 into two corpora comprising 149 million words. We utilized a mixed-method approach that situated Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic models in a critical discourse studies (CDS) framework. In both years, topics related to health, crime, paralympic sports, and politics/rights/accessibility predominated. However, we also found a marked shift over the time period toward a ‘personalization’ frame, where news media discourse foregrounded individual disabled people. Our study suggests that an emphasis on personalized stories rather than structural issues risk reproducing the ‘heroic/tragic’ binary of stereotypical representation.