  The automatic content analysis of mass media in the social sciences has
become necessary and possible with the raise of social media and computational
power. One particularly promising avenue of research concerns the use of
opinion mining. We design and implement the POPmine system which is able to
collect texts from web-based conventional media (news items in mainstream media
sites) and social media (blogs and Twitter) and to process those texts,
recognizing topics and political actors, analyzing relevant linguistic units,
and generating indicators of both frequency of mention and polarity
(positivity/negativity) of mentions to political actors across sources, types
of sources, and across time.
