Can a public emerge from a crime map?

In this article we consider the extent to which a public, in the strongest sense of the term, can form around the occurrences disseminated by online journalistic platforms—in other words, not only a set of individuals who consume information, but a collective being that shares common interpretations. To this end, we analysed a corpus of 28,828 comments posted on “The Homicide Report”, a platform launched in 2010 to provide standardized information on all homicides committed in Los Angeles. We drew on a text analysis method rarely used in the social sciences, based on supervised machine learning algorithms. This study produced two findings. First, it shows that Internet users develop shared interpretations based on the occurrences presented to them, by combining three ways of “making a public” that borrow from traditional media. Second, it shows that the sociological exploitation of textual traces narrows the gap between quantitative audience surveys that are large scale but fail to capture interpretations, and more qualitative studies which capture interpretations on a very local scale.