Viva la Nano-Revolución! A Semantic Analysis of the Spanish National Press

This study analyzes nanotechnology’s anchoring and codification in the Spanish national press to determine the thematic contexts in which this technology has been discussed. Latent semantic analysis was applied to identify themes based on semantic clusters and their longitudinal evolution. This analysis was carried out on a corpus of more than 600 articles from the most prominent Spanish national newspapers and includes articles from 1997 to 2009. Findings indicate an overall positive coverage and dominant thematic clusters related to national policies, economic development, and business opportunities. Surprisingly, controversies surrounding nanotechnology are present in the early years of coverage but have become marginal over time, in contradiction to a general trend that emerged from previous studies on media representations of new technologies.