(by Monika Bednarek)
In recent years, researchers have begun to employ corpus linguistic methods in several disciplines outside linguistics. To give just a few examples here, corpus linguistic techniques have been used by historians (e.g. McEnery and Baker, 2016), law scholars (e.g. Mouritsen, 2010), and sociologists (e.g. Zinn, 2018). Indeed, the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University – with whom the Sydney Corpus Lab has recently established an official partnership, was explicitly created to bring corpus linguistics to a range of social sciences.
In this new article, we focus specifically on using corpus linguistics to enable computer-assisted digital text-analysis for Journalism and Communications Research. The article illustrates how corpus linguistic techniques can be used to analyse:
- (Dis)preferred language or labelling,
- Sources (who is quoted/cited),
- Stigma/responsibility/framing,
- Bespoke, project-specific questions.
Our target audience is those who are new to digital research and trained in classic techniques such as discourse, framing or content analysis rather than those already working in computational research. Corpus linguistic software is often easy-to-use from a technical perspective and does not require programming knowledge. This type of research therefore may enable more Journalism and Communications scholars to harness the power of the computer for quantitative and qualitative text analysis.
(If you are unable to access the article [behind paywall], you can contact me for a copy.)
References
McEnery T and Baker HS (2016) Corpus Linguistics and 17th-Century Prostitution: Computational Linguistics and History. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Mouritsen SC (2010) The dictionary is not a fortress: Definitional fallacies and a corpus-based approach to plain meaning. BYU Law Review 1915. Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview/vol2010/iss5/10
Zinn J (2018) The proliferation of “at risk” in The Times: A corpus approach to historical social change, 1785–2009. Historische Sozialforschung / Historical Social Research 43(2): 313–3