Multi-modal considerations for social media discourse analysis: A specialised corpus of Twitter commentary on working from home

Fitzgerald, Chris, Mark, Geraldine, O'Keeffe, Anne, Knight, Dawn ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4745-6502, McNamara, Justin, Adolphs, Svenja, Clark, Leigh, Cowan, Benjamin, Fahey Palma, Tania, Farr, Fiona and Peraldi, Sandrine 2024. Multi-modal considerations for social media discourse analysis: A specialised corpus of Twitter commentary on working from home. Coats, Steven and Laippala, Veronika, eds. Linguistics across Disciplinary Borders - The March of Data, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 187-212.

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Abstract

Social media discourse has evolved beyond merely textual communication into a more dynamic multi-modal communicative act with text supported by photographs, videos, emojis, gifs and other media. While social media discourse analysis facilitates rich investigation into public sentiment towards topical issues (Berber Sardinha 2022), there are challenges faced when compiling text-based corpora containing these multiple media. Extracting a holistic understanding of social media communication is reliant on these visual media to support the text-based discourse. Therefore, an analysis of the textual communication alone is a degraded platform from which to establish a rigorous interpretational framework. This chapter investigates a corpus of tweets extracted and compiled during a period of transition for workers experiencing a move from working from home to a return to the office workplace in the post-Covid environment (January-February 2022). While Twitter data-mining tools are attractive for their capacity to extract large datasets efficiently (Ruiz-Soler 2017), we argue that a smaller, specialised corpus of manually extracted tweets can provide a more principled and holistic analysis with consideration given to multiple media. Ethical barriers and considerations regarding the use of this data are explored and an assessment of manual approaches to corpus construction and analysis of this data is provided.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Publisher:	Bloomsbury
ISBN:	978-1350362260
Funders:	AHRC, IRC
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	2 April 2024
Last Modified:	22 Aug 2024 01:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/166436

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