LEMEL Research project (L’Europe dans les médias en ligne) : Studying the media coverage of European issues in/through online media

The LEMEL project is a comparative, international and networked research project. Our aim is to analyse the representations and framing of Europe and European controversies in online media from various countries, in order to identify different patterns of storytelling about Europe in online news, the European identity they promote and the political principles they value. Our originality lies in the methodology of the research: each team gathers a corpus of item related to the coverage of European issues in national online news for the same period of time; the corpuses are analysed according to a common grid; the results are put in common during European workshops and transnational themes are identified; researchers from different countries gather into thematic groups in order to publish papers on specific aspects of the global analysis. The keywords for the project are European media sphere, media framing, representations, identification, media events, European themes, categories, discourse analysis, ways of appropriation.
The long-term goal of the LEMEL research project is also to build a European research network to run similar pan-European analysis each year.