Keynote Speaker: Professor Ruth Page，University of Birmingham

Date: 25th October, 2024

Time: 16:00 (Beijing Time)

Abstract: In this webinar, I will set out the possibilities of practicalities of using discourse analysis as a method that is readily combined with corpus linguistics to provide an in-depth exploration of data that bridges text and context. Drawing on methods used in mediated narrative analysis (Page, 2018), I will showcase two ways in which discourse analysis helps us to understand contextual patterns in the data that are linked to wider social issues. In the first case, I will show how the use of parallel corpora in Sketch Engine were used to explore the responses to different speech acts used by politicians as they communicated with their audiences via Twitter in the Covid-19 pandemic (Page and Hansson, 2023). In the second case study, I will show how the comments to stories told by mental health influencers evaluated content as more or less helpful to their audiences (Christiansen and Page, forthcoming).