Cover not available
Part of
Social Media and Society: Integrating the digital with the social in digital discourse
Edited by Majid KhosraviNik
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 100] 2023
► pp. 15–37

Digital distribution processes and “new” research tools in SM-CDS

| University of Navarra
| Newcastle University
The present chapter aspires to clarify the critical role of different distribution processes in conceptual organisation for Social Media CDS (SM-CDS), an emerging theory and method wherein the specific nature and context of digitally mediated meaning-making is structurally integrated into CDS research (KhosraviNik 2020; KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). In order to map key distribution processes and critical caveats around them in the digital sphere, we discuss some specific theoretical views around the notion of the distribution process in CDS, introduce analytical tools and techniques for the visualisation and analysis of social media data, and show how they can work as complementary techniques for SM-CDS studies. While rooted in core critical discursive principles, in fact, SM-CDS aspires to selectively and systematically incorporate digital theory approaches such as data science and analytics, visualization methods and videography, among others. In particular, we present three different methods, namely Social Network Analysis, Sentiment Analysis, and Digital Ethnography, as useful approaches to explore complex aspects of discursive distribution, affectivity, social and power relations in the cybersphere.
Article outline
  • CDS and distribution processes
  • Social media and distribution processes
  • New synergies and new research tools for SM-CDS
  • Social network analysis and CDS
  • Sentiment analysis and CDS
    • Digital ethnography and CDS
  • Concluding remarks
  • References
Published online: 14 April 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.100.02esp
References (76)
References
Abernathy, Ralph. 2016. Using Geodata and Geolocation in the Social Sciences: Mapping Our Connected World. London and Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Ahmad, Munir, Shabab Aftab, Syed Muhammad, and Sarfraz Ahmad. 2017. “Machine Learning Techniques for Sentiment Analysis: A Review.” Int. J. Multidiscip. Sci. Eng 8 (3): 27–32.Google Scholar
Airoldi, Massimo. 2018. “Ethnography and the Digital Fields of Social Media.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 21 (6): 661–673. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Al Zidjaly, Najma. 2019. “Digital Activism as Nexus Analysis: A Sociolinguistic Example from Arabic Twitter.” Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies paper no 221.Google Scholar
Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2008. “Potentials and Limitations of Discourse-centred Online Ethnography.” Language@ Internet 5 (8).Google Scholar
. 2013. “Online Data Collection.” In Data Collection in Sociolinguistics: Methods and Applications, ed. by Christine Malinson, Becky Childs, and Gerard Van Herk, 236–250. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Antaki, Charles, Rebecca Barnes, and Ivan Leudar. 2005. “Diagnostic Formulations in Psychotherapy.” Discourse Studies 7 (6): 627–647. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Basu, Aparna. 2014. “Social Network Analysis: A Methodology for Studying Terrorism.” In Social Networking: Mining, Visualization, and Security, ed. by Mrutyunjaya Panda, Satchidananda Dehuri, and Gi-Nam Wang, 215–242. Intelligent Systems Reference Library vol. 65. Cham: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berglund, Therese Örnberg. 2009. “Disrupted Turn Adjacency and Coherence Maintenance in Instant- messaging Conversations.” Language@Internet 6 (2).Google Scholar
Bonilla, Yarimar, and Jonathan Rosa. 2015. #Ferguson: Digital protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States. American Ethnologist 42 (1): 4–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
boyd, danah. 2011. “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications.” In Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, ed. by Zizi Papacharissi, 39–58. London: RoutledgeGoogle Scholar
Caliandro, Alessandro. 2018. “Digital Methods for Ethnography: Analytical Concepts for Ethnographers Exploring Social Media Environments.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 47 (5): 551–578. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carrington, John, and Peter J. Scott. 2011. The SAGE Handbook of Social Network Analysis. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Catalano, Theresa, and Linda R. Waugh. 2020. Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse Studies and Beyond. London: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chouliaraki, Lilie, and Norman Fairclough. 1999. Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Cook, Guy. 2001. The Discourse of Advertising. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dillet, Benoît. 2020. “Speaking to Algorithms? Rhetorical Political Analysis as Technological Analysis.” Politics. Online First. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ding, J., Hailong Sun, Xu Wang, and Xudong Liu. 2018. “Entity-level Sentiment Analysis of Issue Comments.” SEmotion ’18: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Emotion Awareness in Software Engineering 7–13. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Downey, John, and Natalie Fenton. 2003. “New Media, Counter Publicity and the Public Sphere.” New Media & Society 5 (2): 185–202. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Downing, Joseph, and Wasim Ahmed. 2019. “#MacronLeaks as a ‘Warning Shot’ for European Democracies.” French Politics 17 (3): 257–278. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Esposito, Eleonora, and Francesco L. Sinatora (2022). “Social Media Discourses of Feminist Protest from the Arab Levant: Digital Mirroring and Transregional Dialogue.” Critical Discourse Studies. 19 (5): 502–522. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Research of Language. London and New York: Longman.Google Scholar
. 2003. Analyzing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fairclough, Norman, and Ruth Wodak. 1997. “Critical Discourse Analysis.” In Discourse Studies. A Multidisciplinary Introduction. Discourse as Social Interaction, ed. by Teun A. van Dijk, 258–284. London: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Fang, Xing, and Justin Zhan. 2015. “Sentiment Analysis Using Product Review Data.” Journal of Big Data 2 (1):1–14. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fetterman, David M. 1989. Ethnography Step by Step. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Gee, James Paul. 2011. How to do a Discourse Analysis: a Toolkit. New York: RoutledgeGoogle Scholar
Gerbaudo, Paolo. 2012. Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Ghaffari, Soudeh. 2020. “Discourses of Celebrities on Instagram: Digital Femininity, Self-Representation and Hate Speech.” Critical Discourse Studies. Online First. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hall, Stuart. 1980. “Encoding/Decoding.” In Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–1979, ed. by Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 128–138. London: Hutchinson.Google Scholar
Hallett, Ronald, and Kristen Barber. 2014. “Ethnographic Research in a Cyber Era.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 43: 306–330. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Herring, Susan. 2004. “Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis: an Approach to Researching Online Behaviour.” In Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning, ed. by Sasha A. Barab, Rob Kling, and James H. Gray, 339–376. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Himelboim, Itai. 2017. “Social Network Analysis (Social Media).” In The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods, ed. by Jörg Matthes, Christine S. Davis, and Robert F. Potter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hine, Christine. 2000. Virtual Ethnography. London: SAGE. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2015. Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.Google Scholar
Jones, Rodney H., Alice Chik, and Christoph Hafner (eds.). 2014. Discourse and Digital Practices: Doing Discourse Analysis in the Digital Age. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
KhosraviNik, Majid. 2014. Critical Discourse Analysis, Power and New Media Discourse.Google Scholar
. 2017. “Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS).” In Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, ed. by John Flowerdew, and John Richardson, 582–596. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2018. “Social Media Techno-Discursive Design, Affective Communication and Contemporary Politics.” Fundan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 11 (4): 427–442. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2019. “Populist Digital Media? Social media systems and the global populist right discourse.” Public Seminar. [URL]
. 2020. “Digital Meaning-Making Across Content and Practice in Social Media Critical Discourse Studies.” Critical Discourse Studies. Online First. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
KhosraviNik, Majid, and Eleonora Esposito. 2018. “Online Hate, Digital Discourse and Critique: Exploring Digitally-Mediated Discursive Practices of Gender-Based Hostility.” Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 14 (1): 45–68. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kozinets, Robert V. 2010. Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. London: SAGE.Google Scholar
2015. Netnography Redefined. London: SAGE.Google Scholar
Krzyżanowski, Michal. 2011. Ethnography and critical discourse analysis: towards a problem-oriented research dialogue. Critical Discourse Studies 8 (4): 231–238. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lingiardi, Vittorio, Nicola Carone, Giovanni Semeraro, Cataldo Musto, Marilisa D’Amico, and Silvia Brena. 2020. “Mapping Twitter Hate Speech Towards Social And Sexual Minorities: A Lexicon-Based Approach To Semantic Content Analysis.” Behaviour & Information Technology 39 (7): 711–721. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lugosi, Peter, Hania Janta, and Pamela Watson. 2012. “Investigative Management and Consumer Research on the Internet.” International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management. 24 (6): 838–854. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McGlashan, Mark. 2020. “Collective Identity and Discourse Practice in the Followership of the Football Lads Alliance on Twitter.” Discourse & Society 31 (3): 307–328. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moser, Christine, Peter Groenewegen, and Marleen Huysman. 2013. “Extending Social Network Analysis with Discourse Analysis – Combining Relational with Interpretive Data.” In The influence of Technology on Social Network Analysis and Mining, ed. by Tansel Ozyer, Jon Rokne, Gerhard Wagner, and Arno H. P. Reuser, 547–561. Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Murthy, Dhiraj. 2008. “Digital Ethnography: An Examination of the Use of New Technologies for Social Research.” Sociology 42 (5): 837–855. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nooraie, Yousefi Reza, Joanna E. M. Sale, Alexandra Marin, and Lori E. Ross. 2020. “Social Network Analysis: An Example of Fusion Between Quantitative and Qualitative Methods.” Journal of Mixed Methods Research 14 (1): 110–124. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Norris, Sarah, and Rodney H. Jones. 2005. Discourse in Action: Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis. London Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Peng, Altman Yuzhu. 2020. “Amplification of Regional Discrimination on Chinese News Portals: An Affective Critical Discourse Analysis.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Online First. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pink, Sarah, Heather Horst, John Postill, Larissa Hjorth, Tania Lewis, and Jo Tacchi. 2016. Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practices. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Ravi, Kumar, and Vadlamani Ravi. 2015. “A Survey on Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis: Tasks, Approaches and Applications.” Knowledge-based Systems 89: 14–46. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Richardson, John. 2006. Analysing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ross, Andrew S., and Damian J. Rivers. 2017. “Digital Cultures of Political Participation: Internet Memes and the Discursive Delegitimization of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Candidates.” Discourse, Context & Media 16: 1–11. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schmidt, Anna, and Michael Wiegand. 2017. “A Survey on Hate Speech Detection Using Natural Language Processing.” In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing For Social Media, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 1–10. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schönfeldt, Juliane, and Andrea Golato. 2003. “Repair in Chats: A Conversation Analytic Approach.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 36 (3): 241–284. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scott, John. 2017. Social Network Analysis. 4th ed. London: SAGE. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sinatora, Francesco. L. 2020. Language, Identity and Syrian Political Activism on Social Media. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Smith, Marc, Ben Shneiderman, Lee Rainie, and Itai Himelboim. 2014. “Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters.” Pew Research Center. [URL]
Taboada, Maite, Julian Brooke, Milan Tofiloski, Kimberly Voll, and Manfred Stede. 2011. “Lexicon-Based Methods for Sentiment Analysis.” Computational Linguistics 37 (2): 267–307. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taboada, Maite. 2016. “Sentiment Analysis: An Overview from Linguistics.” Annual Review of Linguistics 2 (1): 325–347. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thurlow, Crispin, Laura Lengel, and Alice Tomic. 2009. Computer Mediated Communication: Social Interaction and the Internet. London: SAGE.Google Scholar
Tunçalp, Deniz, and Patrick L. Lê. 2014. “(Re) Locating Boundaries: A Systematic Review of Online Ethnography.” Journal of Organizational Ethnography 3 (1), 59–79. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Veilleux-Lepage, Yannick, and Emil Archambault. 2019. “Mapping Transnational Extremist Networks: An Exploratory Study of the Soldiers of Odin’s Facebook Network, Using Integrated Social Network Analysis.” Perspectives on Terrorism 13 (2): 21–38.Google Scholar
Verma, Binita, and Ramjevaan Singh Thakur. 2018. “Sentiment Analysis Using Lexicon and Machine Learning-Based Approaches: A Survey.” In Proceedings of International Conference on Recent Advancement on Computer and Communication, ed. by Basant Tiwari, Vivek Tiwari, Kinkar Chandra Das, Durgesh Kumar Mishra, and Jagdish C. Bansal, 441–447. Singapore: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wang, Hao, Dogan Can, Abe Kazemzadeh, François Bar, and Shrikanth Narayanan. 2012. “A System for Real-time Twitter Sentiment Analysis of 2012 US Presidential Election Cycle.” Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2012 System Demonstrations Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 115–120.Google Scholar
Ward, Katie J. 1999. Cyber-Ethnography and the Emergence of the Virtually New Community. Journal of Information Technology 14 (1): 95–105. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Watanabe, Hajime, Mondher Bouazizi, and Tomoaki Ohtsuki. 2018. “Hate Speech on Twitter: A Pragmatic Approach to Collect Hateful and Offensive Expressions and Perform Hate Speech Detection.” IEEE Access 6 13825–13835. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wiebe, Janyce, Theresa Wilson, and Claire Cardie. 2005. “Annotating Expressions of Opinions and Emotions in Language.” Language Res Eval 39: 165–210. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wiggins, Bradley E. 2019. The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture: Ideology, Semiotics, and Intertextuality. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, and Kristof Savski. 2018. “Critical Discourse-Ethnographic Approaches to Language Policy.” The Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning, 93–112.Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth. 2009. The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Esposito, Eleonora, Nicha Selvon-Ramkissoon & Ryan Durgasingh
2024. Digital Discourses on Gender-Based Violence in Trinidad and Tobago. In Caribbean Discourses, ► pp. 287 ff. DOI logo
Esposito, Eleonora & Angela Zottola
2024. Intersecting hostilities around the European migration crisis: the case of Carola Rackete and the Sea-Watch 3. Critical Discourse Studies 21:5 ► pp. 522 ff. DOI logo
Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak, Agnieszka & Magdalena Zabielska
2024.  Please explain what this diagnosis means because I don’t quite understand . Language and Dialogue 14:2 ► pp. 214 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.