CORPUS-ASSISTED (CRITICAL) DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Tieja Thomas, PhD Vivek Venkatesh, PhD

4 February 2016

@TiejaThomas #CACDA

What we aim to accomplish today…

•  6 W’s of digital research methods

•  Corpus-assisted (critical) discourse analysis

•  Hands-on activity

@TiejaThomas #CACDA

DIGITAL RESEARCH METHODS A brief introduction to

WHY conduct digital research?

•  Information, knowledge

•  Learning

•  Relationships, communities

•  Identities

@TiejaThomas #CACDA

WHO (what) is my unit of analysis?

•  Individual users

•  Online communities

•  Speech acts

•  Websites

•  Behaviours

@TiejaThomas #CACDA

WHAT are key digital research methods?

Method •  Individual users •  Online communities

•  Speech acts

•  Websites

•  Online behaviours

Unit of analysis •  Online ethnography •  Netnography •  Computer-mediated

discourse analysis •  Corpus-assisted (critical)

discourse analysis •  Content analysis •  Network analysis

@TiejaThomas #CACDA

WHERE do I conduct digital research?

•  Social media platforms •  Facebook, Twitter, reddit, Instagram

•  Online gaming platforms •  Steam, Xbox Live, Playstation Network

•  Online news outlets •  huffingtonpost.ca, CBC.ca, theglobeandmail.com

•  Digital communication •  Email, SMS, WhatsApp

@TiejaThomas #CACDA

HOW do I conduct digital research?

•  On-/offline divide

•  Researcher role

•  Privacy: contextual integrity

•  Data management tools

@TiejaThomas #CACDA

WHEN do I stop collecting data?

•  Data deluge (!)

•  What data are relevant?

– User data

– Networks

– Site analytics, affordances

@TiejaThomas #CACDA

CACDA Corpus-assisted (critical) discourse analysis

What is CACDA?

Corpus Linguistics + Critical Discourse Analysis

@TiejaThomas #CACDA

•  Quantitative study of language

•  Analysis of large volumes of naturally occurring e-data

•  Linguistic patterns

•  Qualitative study of power and ideology through language

•  Linguistic indicators, patterns

CACDA allows you to connect micro- and macro-level linguistic/discursive patterns.

CACDA in Practice

•  Analysis of reddit conversations

•  Trial and error Boolean searches

•  Data management •  Diigo, copy/paste

@TiejaThomas #CACDA

Preparing Data for CACDA

@TiejaThomas #CACDA

DEMO & HANDS-ON ACTIVITY It’s time for a

CACDA: SketchEngine

•  Corpus info: •  Provides overall statistics and information

•  Word list: •  Produces frequency counts

•  Word sketch: •  Provides information about collocations, frequency,

grammatical relationships

•  Wildcards: •  Start search term with (?!) to ignore case •  Insert .* anywhere within search term to broaden search •  EX) (?!)qu.*be.* will return such hits as Quebec,

Québec, québecois

@TiejaThomas #CACDA

CACDA: Preparing Data for SketchEngine

•  Data need to be in .txt format

•  Encode text using Unicode 5.1 – UTF8

@TiejaThomas #CACDA

CACDA: Collocation

•  The above-chance co-occurrence of two or more words within a predetermined span – e.g., 5 words on either side of a ‘node’ or ‘key’ word.

•  logDice: relative frequencies of XY in relation

to X and Y •  Min. value = 0 ; Max. value = 14

@TiejaThomas #CACDA