How Does Regionality Influence Meaning Structures Concerning Peatland Rewetting in Germany? A Structural Topic Modeling (STM) Approach to Understanding the Discourse on a large-scale Climate Protection Measure

The data and code published here relate to a study that presents an analysis of the recent German discourse on peatland rewetting. The study is based on a data corpus of 1,957 newspaper articles published between 2019 and July 2023, mainly in peatland-rich regions of Germany. We focus our investigation on the influence of regionality on the public sensemaking about peatland rewetting. Due to the large scope of the analysis, we used Structural Topic Modeling (STM) as a technique to identify discursive features and meaning structures. The data provided here are supplementary material to the analysis. We provide a commented code that makes the data preprocessing and analysis steps transparent. Furthermore, we publish datasets containing the metadata of the newspaper articles and the probabilities to which they are assigned for each of the 35 calculated topics used for the interpretation.