Corpus Approaches to Language in Social Media

This book showcases the unique possibilities of corpus linguistic methodologies in engaging with and analysing language data from social media, surveying current approaches and offering guidelines and best practices for doing language analysis.

The volume provides an overview of how language in social media has been approached by both linguists and non-linguists, before digging deeper into the identification of datasets needs to fill linguistic investigations of social media and the technical aspects of particular platforms which may influence analysis, such as emoticons, retweets, and metadata. Sample Python code, along with general guidelines for using it, are provided to empower researchers to apply these techniques in their own work, supported by actual examples from three real-life case studies. Di Cristofaro highlights the full potential of using these methodologies in analysing social media language data and the ways in which they might pave the way for future applications of data analysis and processing for corpus linguistics.

The book will be key reading for researchers in corpus linguistics and linguists and social scientists interested in data-driven analysis of social media.