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Our article examines how journalistic reports and online comments have made sense of computational politics. It treats the discourse around data-driven campaigns as its object of analysis and codifies four main perspectives that have structured the debates about the use of large data sets and data analytics in elections. We study American, British, and German sources on the 2016 United States presidential election, the 2017 United Kingdom general election, and the 2017 German federal election. There, groups of speakers maneuvered between enthusiastic, skeptical, agnostic, or admonitory stances and so cannot be clearly mapped onto these four discursive positions. Coming along with the inconsistent accounts, public sensemaking was marked by an atmosphere of speculation about the substance and effects of computational politics. We conclude that this equivocality helped journalists and commentators to sideline prior reporting on the issue in order to repeatedly rediscover the practices they had already covered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper looks into the practice of a computer-assisted discourse analysis. Centring on the decisions and procedures that go into reconstructing multimodal frames from transmedia discourse, the paper has two aims. For one, it discusses the chances and challenges automatic text analysis has to address in facing the vast amounts of multimodal discourse that emerge in convergent media. Building on that, the paper explains the methodological premises and methodical procedures of a discourse analysis employing the computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software Atlas.ti. As such, it presents an investigation that does not answer the current prevalence of available 'big data' with computer power but explores the interplay between an interpretative analysis and technological support. It does so by using material from the discourse on the so-called Handygate affair. There, state authorities collected mobile phone data during the commemorative events of the Dresden bombings in February 2011. They thus created a big data collection which became the subject of public attention and was either framed as illegal and extensive instrument of state surveillance or as an efficient and accurate tool for law enforcement and targeted prosecution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The internet affords many different types of multimodal and networked communication. That said, the paper asks about the conceptual standing of online texts that are (re-)made, viewed and read in acts of communication. It thus seeks to develop a conceptual approach towards defining online texts as accomplished and enacted sign ensembles that are afforded by communicative settings. To this end, we mobilise insights from linguistics and communication studies as well as sensibilities from the sociology of technology so as to combine understandings of media affordances, communicative genres and markers of textuality with a view on the routine work that goes into making and employing texts. Taken together, online texts are understood as visually displayed, interface-sensitive and prefigured sets of signs whose specific designs and coherent and cohesive organisations depend on situations, ways of handling, code and viewing devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]