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Most linguistic studies of political speaking in the field of critical discourse analysis tend to focus on speeches delivered by prominent politicians either in a domestic party-political setting or in the international arena. Less attention has been afforded to speeches by civil rights activists and campaigners for other progressive causes. To fill this gap, the present paper focuses on political speaking occurring outside of the party-political setting. The data comprises 120 American activist speeches from the years 1808-2016. The analysis focuses on the construction of ingroups and outgroups, and whether the use of personal pronouns is affected by the type of audience. The frequency trends bring forth new information about the referential complexity of pronouns within individual speeches.

As the growing influence of the radical right turns cultural institutions into political symbols (Harding, 2021), online forums and social media are key venues for antagonistic outbursts directed at public libraries (Carlsson, Hanell & Hansson 2022). Trolling the Library aims to explore radical right digital attacks against public libraries, and is currently piloting different methods to analyse online comments and news items from the website SamNytt. This contribution outlines one intended deliverable of the project: a shareable workflow for the low-code tool KNIME (KoNstanz Information MinEr). Low-code tools play an important role in making data analysis and visualization accessible to researchers and students with limited experience, or interest, in programming (see De Mauro, Marzoni & Walter, 2021). While low-code tools do introduce closed-box issues, they can still be considered important steppingstones towards computational approaches (Tyrkkö & Ihrmark, submitted). An additional benefit is the shareability of the workflow resulting from designing the method pipeline in tools such as KNIME or Orange. The specific workflow resulting from Trolling the Library contains sentiment analysis and topic modeling components. While limited in scope, the discussion of the workflow highlights both the benefits and drawbacks of low-code workflows as potential shareable resources for the digital humanities. This contribution focuses on the ease of use, possible obstacles from an unfamiliar user’s perspective, and the availability of appropriate resources for the platform. Works cited: Carlsson, H., Hanell, F., & Hansson, J. (2022). ”Det känns som att jag bara sitter och väntar på att det ska explodera”: politisk påverkan på de kommunala folkbibliotekens verksamhet i sex sydsvenska regioner. Nordic Journal of Library and Information Studies, 3(1), 26-43. De Mauro Andrea, Francesco Marzoni & Andrew J. Walter. 2021. Data Analytics Made Easy: Ana

Whether we are talking about the structural properties of corpora or the dispersion of linguistic phenomena within corpora or the language system, corpus-based analyses almost invariably deal with complex and relational data. However, due in part to the design of online and standalone corpus tools, corpora are often treated exclusively from the so-called bag-of-words perspective. As corpora have increased in size, it has become increasingly difficult to understand their structures and metadata, and associations between linguistic features are almost impossible to grasp from tabular data and test statistics alone. In recent years, data visualisation methods developed in the natural sciences have become a part of the digital humanist’s toolkit for gaining insights into complex data, understanding their structure, for identifying outliers and noteworthy categories, and for communicating findings in a way that readers and audiences will remember. In this paper, I will focus on network visualisations, which are highly suited for both exploring and presenting complex linked data. The main tool discussed is Cytoscape, an open-access network visualisation tool widely used in bioinformatics and supported by a large user-base. I will present a series of case studies of how network visualisations can assist in both exploratory analysis and descriptive visualisation of corpora and linguistic data. First, I will demonstrate their utility for exploring the structures of corpora and their metadata. Second, I will show how visualisation methods can clarify collocate relationships and how such visualisations can be designed to represent association strengths in a way that does not mislead the reader. And third, I use network graphing to explore the distribution of multilingual elements across millions of tweets, combining linguistic data and metadata to produce an overview that could not be represented otherwise.

In Sweden, the growing influence of the radical right have turned cultural institutions into political symbols in an emerging ‘culture war’ (Harding, 2021). Carlsson, Hanell & Hansson (2022) show how digital forums and social media play a significant part in orchestrating the ideologically laden conflicts and confrontations that public libraries are currently facing. This prompts an investigation of the digital environments where supporters of radical right-wing ideas interact, share thoughts, construct collective identities, and coordinate actions towards libraries. In this explorative pilot study, we use selected methods on a small dataset to test viable methods and approaches., Medverkan ej belagd 231122

We conduct an analysis of the link between colloquialisation and democratisation in debates in the British parliament. Our corpus is a sampler of the Hansard archive, covering the period 1803–2005 and containing 170 million words. We first investigate how the linguistic patterns of parliamentary debates have evolved, and second how the content of the debates has changed over time. Combining these two research questions allows us to step to a third question: are there direct relations between linguistic features, most notably colloquialisation and compression of language, and the topical content of parliamentary discourse, particularly its underpinnings in social and political democratisation processes? We also critically discuss strong correlations between features of language complexity and democracy indices. We adopt an interdisciplinary perspective embedded in both linguistics and political sciences.

We conduct an analysis of the link between colloquialisation and democratisation in debates in the British parliament. Our corpus is a sampler of the Hansard archive, covering the period 1803–2005 and containing 170 million words. We first investigate how the linguistic patterns of parliamentary debates have evolved, and second how the content of the debates has changed over time. Combining these two research questions allows us to step to a third question: are there direct relations between linguistic features, most notably colloquialisation and compression of language, and the topical content of parliamentary discourse, particularly its underpinnings in social and political democratisation processes? We also critically discuss strong correlations between features of language complexity and democracy indices. We adopt an interdisciplinary perspective embedded in both linguistics and political sciences.

This chapter investigates discourses of mental health in the British parliament over two centuries (1800–2020). A pattern-driven approach is used to explore terminology related to mentally ill people, mental institutions, and mental health in general. The study focuses on lexical trends in parliamentary discourse, the extent to which mental health discourse was discussed in general, and the way in which the lexis of modern mental health care has developed. The results show that the major shifts in the entire lexical field have happened in specific time periods, the turning points being in the 1840s, 1930s and 1950s. The general attitude also seems to have shifted, and the data show an increasing concern for legally protecting people with mental illness.

This chapter investigates medieval English glossaries via the lens of Mark Sebba’s framework for a multimodal analysis of multilingual texts. The analysis focuses on the visual/spatial arrangement of bi- and multilingual material in six glossaries dating from the 7th to the 13th centuries. Glossaries, the medieval precursors of modern dictionaries, represent a text genre with a highly salient layout. They systematically exploit visual/spatial features as a semiotic resource to identify different information categories or to highlight different codes and thus rely on complex literacy practices. The very different layouts attested in medieval glossaries reveal different conceptualisations of the glossary text.

This chapter explores the signalling of social otherness in Punch magazine through the use of non-standard orthography, semi-phonetic spelling, and typographic shifts. Building on the concepts of “orthographic aesthetics” (Jaffe 2000) and “zone of social meaning” (Sebba 2007), we use a corpus of 550 issues of Punch, published between the 1840s and 1920s, to discover how often and in what ways both foreign languages and dialects of English were featured in the periodical. The results show that the decision to use visually salient shifts in the written code to mark voices that deviate from the presumed standard was frequently motivated by humour and the desire to highlight a specific speaker’s membership of a distinct social group that was typically defined by nationality, ethnicity, regional background, or class.

This collection explores the links between multimodality and multilingualism, charting the interplay between languages, channels and forms of communication in multilingual written texts from historical manuscripts through to the new media of today and the non-verbal associations they evoke. The volume argues that features of written texts such as graphics, layout, boundary marking and typography are inseparable from verbal content. Taken together, the chapters adopt a systematic historical perspective to investigate this interplay over time and highlight the ways in which the two disciplines might further inform one another in the future as new technologies emerge. The first half of the volume considers texts where semiotic resources are the sites of modes, where multiple linguistic codes interact on the page and generate extralinguistic associations through visual features and spatial organizaisation. The second half of the book looks at texts where this interface occurs not in the text but rather in the cultural practices involved in social materiality and text transmission. Enhancing our understandings of multimodal resources in both historical and contemporary communication, this book will be of interest to scholars in multimodality, multilingualism, historical communication, discourse analysis and cultural studies.

This chapter argues that the integration of the multimodal and the multilingual which pre-exists modern digital media is all but haphazard. Thus, their dynamics and trends that have endured and developed over centuries call for systematic scholarly exploration. For instance, in historical texts and contemporary social media alike pre-attentive engagement techniques are implemented by content producers in order to guide processing. Other manifestations of the multimodal and multilingual interplay involve orthographic aesthetics which encodes social evaluation and commentary of (linguistic) otherness in late modernity, while visual diamorphs, brevigraphs and non-alphabetic symbols embody the prestige of medieval de-luxe manuscripts. Bilingualism in contemporary social media is as purposeful and commercially devised a tool as the graphics and photos placed in blogs and vlogs by micro-influencers. The chapter offers an approach that paves the way for generalisations and extension to cover further data representing other languages and periods.

The signifier term symptom is strongly associated with the medical register, and its history in English medical writing has been studied quite extensively. This study contributes to our knowledge of the non-medical uses of symptom during the Early Modern period. Drawing on the 1.4-billion-word Early English Books Online corpus, the study examines all extant occurrences of symptom and categorises their usage. The diachronic study shows that non-medical uses of symptom emerged almost immediately after the word came into common use, and that despite its semantic association with medical prognostication and ailments of various kinds, symptom has always been used to some extent as a signifier term referring to positive events and states of being.

The availability of databases of digitised literary materials, such as Google Books, Europeana and historical newspaper databases, has revolutionised many disciplines, e.g., linguistics and history. So far, the use of digitised materials has not been very frequent in the history of books and the history of reading. This article presents tools, methodologies and practices that offer new possibilities in the study of book history and the history of reading. The use of these tools makes it possible to study vast amounts of data quickly and effectively, to present results in helpful visualisations, to make it possible to follow the line of reasoning and, if necessary, to check the reliability of the research by presenting the data for control. The examples presented are drawn from the Google Books database using a simple piece of software that exploits the API of the Google Books Ngram Viewer tool that is available free of charge.

A key task in the study of the system of English predicate complementation is to account for the variation between to infinitive and gerundial complements of verbs and adjectives in recent English. This chapter examines to infinitive and to ‑ing complements of the adjective accustomed, with data from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), in order to assess the impact of factors of different types on the variation in question. The grammatical factors are the Extraction and Choice Principles, and attention is also paid to the possible role of insertions. Following a discussion of the key theoretical concepts and a description of the primary data, a logistic regression model is used to analyse the role of independent variables on complement selection of the adjective accustomed.