Big Data Discourses | A Model of Frame Categories for Analyzing Media Discourse of Emerging Technologies

This article presents a model of frame categories for analyzing media discourse about emerging technologies, applying it to 2 original case studies on UK news coverage of big data and generative artificial intelligence (gen-AI). The Frame Categories for Emerging Technologies (FCET) model offers 4 categories (Conceptualization, Newness, User Experience, and Evaluation) to allow researchers to identify frames inductively while affording easy and effective comparisons across studies. The empirical results demonstrate this, showing that the news included frames unique to each technology (such as Vast for big data and Human-Like for gen-AI), as well as shared frames such as Revolutionary and Important. This article contributes to the literature on media discourse of emerging technologies and offers a methodological approach to improve the quality and comparability of future studies in this area.