Corpus Linguistics 2015, 21-24 July

Alison Sealey and I are participating in a workshop at this year's Corpus Linguistics conference, which is taking place at Lancaster University. The workshop is titled "Topics in Corpus Linguistics for Social Media Research", and the abstract for my presentation is:

The Discursive Representation of Foxes and Bees in the Twittersphere

As one strand of a funded research project that explores how people talk and write about animals (http://animaldiscourse.wordpress.com/), we are constructing a corpus comprising texts from a wide range of genres. One of our sub-corpora consists of tweets, and we have had to find a method of identifying tweets that are about various kinds of animals, while eliminating those where terms denoting animals are used metaphorically (e.g. ‘yeah baby i am an ANIMAL in bed more specifically a koala I can sleep for 22 hours a day’). This presentation will discuss the methods we used to identify relevant tweets and process them for inclusion in our corpus. It will explain some of the approaches we have been using to capture relevant data, including filtering handles and hashtags, as well as tools such as Topsy, which sifts and retrieves tweets published since Twitter’s founding in 2006, and Keyhole, which is a social monitoring database that generates statistical summaries of the circulation and distribution of tweets.

The talk will include analysis of some of the ways foxes and bees have been tweeted about. These two animals have been selected as a way of exploring the networks of associated animal terms or “discursive ecologies” that appear in the corpus. They are associated with the British countryside, but are increasingly becoming urbanised. Central questions to be addressed in the presentation include whether Twitter offers a platform that allows users to give animals a political voice or to speak on their behalf, and whether Twitter offers users a space to develop a critical voice to assess news media and events about animals. Other questions considered are how these tweets assess and construct power relations between humans and animals and how far the referentiality of tweets allows for power to be interrogated.