"Triangulation in Discourse Analysis: Building Bridges between Methods and Data Types"

Dr. Daria Dayter (associate Professor, Tampere University, Finland)

In this talk, I discuss the benefits of using corpus linguistic methods in addition to more widely used content analysis approaches. I focus on corpus-assisted and corpus- based discourse studies, an approach to the study of discourse based on the computer- aided analysis of large volumes of naturally occurring data. These methods introduce a significant component of manual annotation to traditional corpus analysis, and with it, according to some critics, a larger risk of bias. I argue that such criticism can be (at least partly) addressed by drawing on complementary data sources to triangulate one’s findings: in addition to analysing a speech activity, we should also consider the meta- discourse of audiences discussing this speech activity (e.g. on forums or social media comments), or the meta-discourse of the discourse participants themselves. To illustrate this process, I will look at the case studies of persuasive discourses on societally relevant issues: in particular, I will walk the audience through an analysis of the discourse keyword “cancel culture” in a corpus of news on the web over the period of 2017-2023.

Finally, I will touch on the importance of adding credibility and validity to discourse analytical findings not only through combining methods, but also through data triangulation. I will illustrate this process using a case study of pick-up artist online discourse. Pick-up artists are an online community of men who are, according to their self-description, interested in speed seduction enabled by using verbal and behavioural conversation scripts. In the talk, I will describe drawing on three adjacent data sources – a transcript of a YouTube video, comments to that video, and the video creator’s meta-commentary – to validate the findings of a discourse analytic study of misogynistic discourses among pick-up artists.

If you would like to obtain the zoom link to the talk, please contact Thomas Messerli.

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