'Discourses of Distressed Communities: Geographical Text Analysis and Poverty' AND 'Nazi discourse against Israel and Jews on Social Media'
Laura Paterson & Abe Sweiry
CASS, Lancaster University
This week's UCREL CRS will consist of two twenty minute presentations, rather than the usual 40 minute presentation. The abstracts for each talk can be seen below:
Discourses of Distressed Communities: Geographical Text Analysis and Poverty
Geographical Text Analysis (GTA) addresses the often-overlooked geospatial references that are used in texts. This novel approach to corpora and text analysis has the capacity to aid the critical discourse analyst in facilitating a visual representation of biases evident in texts. The Discourses of Distressed Communities project draws upon a multi-million word corpus of UK press data taken from the Guardian and the Daily Mail to map the place names mentioned in close proximity to the semantic field of poverty. GTA utilises a Geographical Collocates Tool (GCT) - or geoparser - to extract all mentions of place occurring within five-to-ten words of a node word, producing 'geographical collocates' and incorporating them into GIS software to produce maps. The aim is to produce visual representations of the use of discourses of poverty in locations spread across the UK. Whilst there have been some small-scale studies showing the viability of using GTA, this process has never been applied to such a large text-based dataset before. There is a large existing body of literature on Corpus CDA and Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies indicating that such methods are suitable and profitable for linguistic analysis, but combining these methods with GTA can add a further dimension to academic argument and discussion. The geoparsed data shows which areas are thematically and proximally linked to particular themes (unemployment, welfare receipt, etc.) to facilitate a new way in to analysing textual data focused on poverty.
Nazi discourse against Israel and Jews on Social Media
Following from the CASS rapid response analysis of antisemitism on Twitter during the Gaza conflict of 2014 for the report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry against Antisemitism, this presentation will offer fresh analysis of a primary theme that was identified in the report - the invocation of Hitler and Nazism against Israel and Jews. Using corpus techniques the presentation will address the prevalence and nature of discourses of Nazi comparison, support for Hitler and Nazism, and Holocaust denial in Tweets during the conflict. The salience and impact of high profile political statements and of counter/resistant discourse will also be addressed. Finally, the paper will briefly discuss the potential of using corpus techniques to monitor over time the prevalence and changes in discourses of antisemitism and other forms of hate speech on social media.