Analysing headlines as a way of downsizing news corpora: Evidence from an Arabic–English comparable corpus of newspaper articles

This study examines whether a qualitative analysis of news headlines produces complementary, convergent, or dissonant findings with a quantitative analysis of the full news story. Headlines are among the most important parts of a news story and its summary. This study investigates the construction of Qaddafi in the headlines of two newspapers before and during the 2011 Libyan civil war. This is based on a sub-corpus of headlines that was taken from a 6.5-million-word corpus of two newspapers; one published in English; The Guardian, and the other in Arabic; Asharq Al-Awsat from 2009 to 2011. The analysis of the headlines has produced complementary and convergent findings with the corpus analysis and suggests that the 2011 Libyan civil war represents a turning point on how Qaddafi is represented in the investigated newspapers. This study concludes that analysing headlines proves to be a good down-sampling option to reduce large news corpora to a workable amount of data.