Community and authority in ROAR Magazine

Abstract

This article responds to a common critique of corpus-based studies as decontextualized exercises in linguistic analysis by illustrating how, in the case of internetbased data, the concordance line can reveal rather than obscure aspects of a textual body's cultural constitution. The data for the study consists of 100 articles of the online political journal ROAR (Reflections on a Revolution) Magazine, which has reported on global instances of public unrest and dissent since 2011. After sketching the relation between the financial crisis commencing in 2007 and the global protests that followed in its wake, the article investigates textual patterns within ROAR's varied output. These patterns, ranging from the collocational profile of the keyword democracy to quotation practices, are shown to be constitutive of a virtual sense of community. This process of identity formation is then shown to have a mythopoetic effect, which ultimately impacts the emplotment of the various events covered and considered by the magazine. Additional attention is paid to ROAR as a cross-platform enterprise. In this respect, the fragmentary nature of the Internet is shown to both facilitate and frustrate the creation of a symbolic sense of community.

Phobia: a corpus study of political diagnostics

“…Most texts in the Internet corpus were published between 2010 and 2020. Earlier studies drawing on this corpus have examined, in specific contexts, the online representation of migrants (Baker, 2020), political authority (Buts, 2020), and women's agency (Karimullah, 2020). Specificity of context must be stressed here, as the corpora were compiled thematically to capture common vocabulary at the interface of science and politics, within the limited sphere of Anglophone alternative media.…”

Unsettling Translation

“…A straightforward and effective way to find out who is afforded authority in a corpus of texts is to search for mentions of proper nouns, particularly personal names (Buts 2020). In the Creation Ministries International (CMI) subcorpus, the most common proper noun, at over 500 occurrences, is God, whose name is almost always capitalized.…”

Methods and visualization tools for the analysis of medical, political and scientific concepts in Genealogies of Knowledge

“…Similarly, this tool allows JB to investigate question 2 of his author question list (in "Author") and questions 2 and 4 of his corpus list (in "Author"). See also the papers by Baker (2020) and Buts (2020) for examples of uses of the frequency comparison tool in scholarly work.…”