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A conceptualisation of Olympic Legacy discourse in British and Brazilian media coverage of the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games

Citation: De castro mello santos, Caio (2025) A conceptualisation of Olympic Legacy discourse in British and Brazilian media coverage of the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Doctoral thesis, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

PhD_Thesis_Caio_Mello_04-07-2025.pdf

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The Summer Olympic Games are held every four years in a different city around the globe, promoting what is considered one of the biggest sporting events in the world. For more than a century of existence, the modern Olympiad has been demanding exorbitant investments from local governments for the development of the infrastructure required to adapt host cities to accommodate the competition as well as athletes and visitors. For this reason, the event has faced criticism for the constant increase of cost that has often been seen as inappropriate by local residents. In this context, the Olympic legacy – what is constructed or developed for the Games – has become the central strategy of the International Olympic Committee to justify the use of scarce public resources. The concept however is disputed and appropriated by different social and political actors, with its meaning not being strictly defined. This thesis investigates how the Olympic legacy discourse has been framed by the British and Brazilian news media coverage of the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games. The corpus is composed of news articles collected from both the live web and web archives, published by British and Brazilian media outlets, in the English and Portuguese languages. The discourse analysis of the material was conducted using distant reading techniques, based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools such as tokenization, word counts, entity recognition, sentiment analysis and network visualisations. These methods were combined with a qualitative close reading of the texts, informed by the discourse analysis tradition. The main objective of this thesis is to provide a conceptualisation of the word ‘legacy’ based on the news media narratives, as well as on the ‘silences’ of those narratives. The thesis contributes to a wider and more comprehensive understanding of the multiple players involved and the tension provoked by their voices in the construction of an ‘Olympic legacy’.

Creators: De castro mello santos, Caio and
Subjects: Digital Humanities
Keywords: Digital Humanities, Media Studies, Discourse Analysis, News, News media, Journalism, NLP, digital methods, machine learning, sentiment analysis, network analysis, Olympic Games, London, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Urbanism, Activism, BBC, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, Folha de Sao Paulo, Estado de Sao Paulo, Globo, Press, mixed-methods, distant reading, public policy, sports, newspapers, text analysis, natural language processing
Divisions: Digital Humanities Research Hub
Collections: Thesis
Dates:
  • 31 July 2025 (completed)

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