Digital media merges disparate places, communities, and topics in reporting about current events, with both local and international impacts. This study maps the semantic spaces of reporting on Catalonia’s independence movement in 2015 onto geographic space, forming a “mediascape” of interwoven themes and places. It uses topic modeling to determine semantic themes and geographic information retrieval to map the geographies of those themes. A global pattern of distance decay from Barcelona, the center of the Catalonian independence movement, is apparent. This study also compares the particular media themes of professional sport, which is a globalizing force in Catalonia’s geopolitical narrative, and the Scottish independence referendum of 2014. It examines the particular geographies that appear in news articles pertaining to each theme. Contrasting the geographies of Catalonian independence and its relation to soccer and Scottish independence through the media produces a spatial–semantic illustration of how mediascapes form from and influence global geopolitical connections.

中文翻译：

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映射媒体景观：通过数字新闻探索加泰罗尼亚 2015 年独立运动的语义和地理空间

数字媒体在报道时事时融合了不同的地点、社区和主题，具有本地和国际影响。本研究将 2015 年加泰罗尼亚独立运动报道的语义空间映射到地理空间，形成主题和地点交织的“媒体景观”。它使用主题建模来确定语义主题和地理信息检索来映射这些主题的地理。距离加泰罗尼亚独立运动中心巴塞罗那的全球距离衰减模式很明显。本研究还比较了职业体育的特定媒体主题（这是加泰罗尼亚地缘政治叙事中的全球化力量）和 2014 年苏格兰独立公投。它检查了与每个主题相关的新闻文章中出现的特定地域。