Seminar cancelled

Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond our control, this seminar has had to be cancelled.

The pluses and minuses of corpus analysis for studying interviews

Donald Matheson, Media and Communication/Arts Digital Lab

Corpus analysis is a useful digital humanities tool for studying discourse, particularly when used in combination with close analysis to find patterns and distinctive features of language use. Interviews, though, are discourse about discourse, which the researcher helps co-create, and so need distinctive ways of analysing them. I find structural approaches that look for topics, textual categories and other signs of interviewers’ knowledge less useful than interactional approaches that look for how interviewees position themselves in relation to what they know.

In this seminar I’ll talk about 25 interviews with publishers, booksellers and agents in Australia for a study on how the book industry can connect with teenage readers. I think corpus analysis has most to offer here when used to study features such as metadiscourse, justifications, stance-taking and talk about emotion, where the book industry professionals reflect on their knowledge about teenagers and young adult reading. The research is part of the ARC Linkage grant, Discovering a ‘good read’ led from Deakin and QUT universities.

Friday 20 August, 12 – 1.30 pm

Logie 401