Cover not available
Part of
Investigating Wikipedia: Linguistic corpus building, exploration and analysis
Edited by Céline Poudat, Harald Lüngen and Laura Herzberg
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 121] 2024
► pp. 134–154

Chapter 5
Sockpuppets, Wikifants, and Honeypots

Metaphorical patterns in digital discourses on Wikipedia talk pages

| University of Duisburg-Essen,
This chapter analyses the discursive construction of collaborative text production via metaphors on talk pages of the English, French, and German Wikipedia. The cross-linguistic study makes use of the WikiDemoCorpus (WDC) to qualitatively reveal the source domains of these metaphors. Situated within the framework of discourse analysis in the tradition of Foucault (1966, 1969, 1971), the study analyses how Wikipedia authors use metaphors to create a certain point of view in their collaborations on talk pages. Additionally, the Wikipedia corpora available at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) via the Corpus Search, Management and Analysis System II (COSMAS II) are used for exemplary quantification. Finally, the potential of further corpus linguistics methods for metaphor identification and analysis is discussed.
Keywords: Wikipedia, metaphors, corpus linguistics, discourse, collaboration
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical aspects
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Qualitative findings in the WDC_Talk corpus
      • 4.1.1Metaphors of fabulous creatures
      • 4.1.2War metaphors
      • 4.1.3Wikifauna and Wikiflora: Zoological and botanical metaphors
      • 4.1.4Illness and addiction metaphors
      • 4.1.5Handicraft metaphors
    • 4.2Quantification and further potential of corpus linguistics methods for metaphor identification
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
  • Tools and online resources
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
References (44)
References
Arendt, Birte & Dreesen, Philipp. 2015. Kontrastive Diskurslinguistik — Werkstattbericht zur Analyse von deutschen und polnischen Wikipedia-Artikeln. Standortbestimmung — Eine reflektierende Vorbemerkung. In Diskurs interdisziplinär. Zugänge, Gegenstände, Perspektiven, Heidrun Kämper & Ingo H. Warnke (eds), 427–445. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beyersdorff, Marius. 2011. Wer definiert Wissen? Wissensaushandlungsprozesse bei kontrovers diskutierten Themen in „Wikipedia — Die freie Enzyklopädie“ — Eine Diskursanalyse am Beispiel der Homöopathie. Münster: Lit-Verlag.Google Scholar
Birke, Julia & Sarkar, Anoop. 2006. A clustering approach for the nearly unsupervised recognition of nonliteral language. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Trento, Italy, April, 329–336. Stroudsburg PA: ACL.Google Scholar
Black, Max. 1983. Die Metapher. In Theorie der Metapher [Wege der Forschung 389], Anselm Haverkamp (ed.), 55–79. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.Google Scholar
Czachur, Waldemar. 2011. Diskursive Weltbilder im Kontrast. Linguistische Konzeption und Methode der kontrastiven Diskursanalyse deutscher und polnischer Medien. Wrocław: Oficyna Wydawnicza ATUT.Google Scholar
Deignan, Alice. 2005. Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics [Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research 6]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Esbrí-Blasco, Montserrat, Girón-García, Carolina & Renau, María L. 2019. Metaphors in the digital world: The case of metaphorical frames in ‘Facebook’ and ‘Amazon’. In Current Approaches to Metaphor Analysis in Discourse, Ignasi Navarro i Ferrando (ed.), 131–154. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Flinz, Carolina & Gredel, Eva. 2019. In- und Exklusionsstrategien im digitalen Diskurs zu Flucht und Migration in der deutschen und der italienischen Sprachversion der Wikipedia. In Sprach(kritik)kompetenz als Mittel demokratischer Willensbildung. Sprachliche In- und Exklusionsstrategien als gesellschaftliche Herausforderung, Thomas Niehr, Sandro Moraldo & Jürgen Schiewe (eds), 177–196. Bremen: Hempen.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
. 1969. l’Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
. 1971. l’Ordre du discours. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
Gredel, Eva. 2015. Metaphorical patterns and the subprime mortgage crisis: Towards cross-linguistics, discourse-specific and n-gram-based dictionaries for sentiment analysis. Studies in Communication Sciences 2015(1): 37–44. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2017. Digital discourse analysis and Wikipedia: Bridging the gap between Foucauldian discourse analysis and digital conversation analysis. Journal of Pragmatics 115: 99–114. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2018a. Verschränkungen ökonomischer Wissensbestände und realistischer Effekte in digitalen Diskursen: Schrauben, schleifen und hobeln an der Online-Enzyklopädie Wikipedia. Medienobservationen = Media Observations 2018: 1–24.Google Scholar
. 2018b. Itis-Kombinatorik auf den Diskussionsseiten der Wikipedia: Ein Wortbildungsmuster zur diskursiven Normierung in der kollaborativen Wissenskonstruktion. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 68: 35–72. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Herring, Susan, Job-Sluder, Kirk, Scheckler, Rebecca & Barab, Sasha. 2002. Searching for safety online: Managing “trolling” in a feminist forum. The Information Society 18(5): 371–384. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kämper, Heidrun & Klosa, Annette. 2010. Elexiko and discourse dictionary: Two types of online-lexicography. Oxford University Research Archive. 〈[URL]〉 (31 January 2020).
Kirchhoff, Susanne. 2010. Krieg mit Metaphern. Mediendiskurse über 9/11 und den ‚War on Terror’. Bielefeld: Transcript.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lüdeling, Anke & Evert, Stefan. 2005. The emergence of productive non-medical -itis. Corpus evidence and qualitative analysis. In Linguistic Evidence. Empirical, Theoretical, and Computational Perspectives, Stephan Kepser & Marga Reis (eds), 351–370. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Musolff, Andreas. 2015a. Metaphern: Quelle von Missverständnissen im interkulturellen Diskurs? In Metapher und Metonymie. Theoretische, methodische und empirische Zugänge, Constanze Spieß & Klaus-Michael Köpke (eds), 247–265. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2015b. Dehumanizing metaphors in UK immigrant debates in press and online media. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 3: 41–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pragglejaz Group. 2007. MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 22: 1–39. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rushkoff, Douglas. 2003. Open Source Democracy. How Online Communication is Changing Offline Politics. London: Demos.Google Scholar
Schwarz-Friesel, Monika. 2015. Metaphern und ihr persuasives Inferenzpotenzial. In Metapher und Metonymie. Theoretische, methodische und empirische Zugänge, Constanze Spieß & Klaus-Michael Köpke (eds), 143–160. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Semino, Elena. 2002. A sturdy baby or a derailing train? Metaphorical representations of the euro in British and Italian newspapers. Text — Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 22(1): 107–139. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2006. Words and their metaphor. A corpus-based approach. In Corpus-Based Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy, Anatol Stefanowitsch & Stefan T. Gries (eds), 63–105. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Storrer, Angelika. 2017. Internetbasierte Kommunikation. In Vielfalt und Einheit der deutschen Sprache: Zweiter Bericht zur Lage der deutschen Sprache, Deutsche Akademie für Sprache undDichtung & Union der Deutschen Akademien derWissenschaft (eds), 247–282. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.Google Scholar
Turney, Peter D., Neuman, Yair, Assaf, Dan & Cohen, Yohai. 2011. Literal and metaphorical sense identification through concrete and abstract context. In Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Regina Barzilay & Mark Johnson (eds), 680–690. Stroudsburg PA: ACL.Google Scholar
Verroneau, Philippe. 2017. Die Euro-Krise in den Massenmedien: Vom Fachdiskurs zum “Storytelling“. In Wirtschaft erzählen. Narrative Formatierungen von Ökonomie, Irmtraud Behr, Anja Kern, Albrecht Plewnia & Jürgen Ritte (eds), 235–245. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Warnke, Ingo. 2013. Urbaner Diskurs und maskierter Protest — Intersektionale Feldperspektiven auf Gentrifizierungsdynamiken in Berlin Kreuzberg. In Angewandte Diskurslinguistik: Felder, Probleme, Perspektiven, Kersten Roth & Carmen Spiegel (eds), 189–221. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weinrich, Harald. 1976. Sprache in Texten. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.Google Scholar
Tools and online resources
COSMAS II. 2020. Corpus Search, Management and Analysis System. 〈[URL]〉 (30 January 2020).
DeReKo. 2020. Deutsches Referenzkorpus. 〈[URL]〉 (30 January 2020).
Wikipedia. 2020a. Glossary. 〈[URL]〉 (30 January 2020).
. 2020b. Glossar. 〈[URL]〉 (30 January 2020).
. 2020c. Jargon de Wikipédia. 〈[URL]〉 (30 January 2020).
. 2020d. Artikel Page elephant. 〈[URL]〉 (30 January 2020).
. 2020e. Honeypot. 〈[URL]〉 (30 January 2020).
. 2020f. Zombies. 〈[URL]〉 (30 January 2020).
. 2021a. Sockpuppetry. 〈[URL]〉 (30 March 2021).
. 2021b. Sockenpuppen. 〈[URL]〉 (30 March 2021).
. 2021c. Faux-nez. 〈[URL]〉 (21 April 2021).
Wiktionary. 2021. Troll. 〈[URL]〉 (29 March 2021).