An AI-enabled approach in analyzing media data: An example from data on COVID-19 news coverage in Vietnam

This method article presents the nuts and bolts of an AI-enabled approach to extracting and analyzing social media data. The method is based on our previous rapidly cited COVID-19 research publication, working on a dataset of more than 14, 000 news articles from Vietnamese newspapers, to provide a comprehensive picture of how Vietnam has been responding to this unprecedented pandemic. This same method is behind our IUCN-supported research regarding the social aspects of environmental protection missions, now appearing in print in Wiley’s Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management. Homemade AI-enabled software was the backbone of the study. The software has provided a fast and automatic approach in collecting and analyzing social data. Moreover, the tool also allows manually sorting the data, AI-generated word tokenizing in the Vietnamese language, and powerful visualization. The method hopes to provide an effective but low-cost method for social scientists to gather a massive amount of data and analyze them in a short amount of time. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.