Today many researchers in linguistics have come to value the internet as the repository of authentic data that provides ‘a freshness and topicality unmatched by fixed corpora’ (Fletcher, 2004: 191). Although at present only a small proportion of discourse analysts and social scientists employ linguistic methods to analyse what and how people write on the internet, this is likely to change in the future as a growing amount of both public and private discourse is becoming available via commercial search engines and digital repositories. As Mautner (2005b) points out, the main value of analysing such online data comes from ‘its significance as a medium in all social domains, with the ubiquitous, round-the-clock connectivity it provides and its privileged status as the primary information source in the public, and increasingly, the private spheres’ (p. 812). In recognition of its growing significance in social science and humanities research, this article introduced a novel way of collecting and studying such data, which allows a more tailored approach to internet data mining than currently available Web concordances and has an important advantage in the permanent storage of texts under analysis. With the sought-after protection against ‘the relentless mutability of web based data’ (Mautner, 2005b: 822) ensured by the downloading of RSS feeds, the compilation and analysis of special purpose corpora based on the textual website updates allows linguists and discourse analysts to engage with ‘real-world problems’ (Cook, 2003: 5) such as climate change as they emerge and not a long time later when they have changed or been superseded by new ones.
In line with the second objective of this study, the large collection of RSS feeds allowed me to establish which constructions modified by the noun carbon were used online in 2007, whereas the special purpose corpus enabled me to explore the online dimension of the definitional struggle around the issue of global warming and climate change mitigation by analysing the blog-based use of these key expressions. The ethical and political implications of different climate mitigation strategies have already received considerable attention from social scientists, while researchers interested in media analysis have identified general discursive features and frames in traditional newspaper coverage of climate change (Boykoff, 2008; Olausson, 2009). This article contributes to this research by studying the lexical surroundings of the ‘carbon keywords’, whose online use reflects and encapsulates the complex discursive processes underlying the social construction of climate change, and in this process demonstrates how ‘macro-level social phenomena are mirrored, on the microlevel of linguistic detail, in the collocational behaviour of individual lexical items’ (Mautner, 2005a).
In particular, the following discursive processes were revealed that characterize the creation and use of carbon compounds. On the one hand, there are attempts to change the Downloaded from connotations of existing and, in some cases, already institutionalized compounds such as carbon offset or carbon credit through the use of adjacent pejorative lexis. These compounds were found to have mixed semantic prosodies as they were used both in the company of neutral semi-technical terms and negatively coloured words, such as fraud, nonsense, meaningless, idiotic, etc. (that is, used either in support of or in criticism of different positions on climate change mitigation options). In this way, in addition to their diachronically
primary meanings, these compounds seem to have acquired new context-dependent connotations as a result of their habitual negative associations in the online discourses captured in the special purpose corpus of RSS feeds. On the other hand, there is a creative coinage of new, more ad-hoc compounds, which follows the well-established route of carbon as a modifier plus noun. In these instances, the head nouns serve to conceptualize mostly individual efforts to minimize the human impact on the environment (carbon diet), or harbour allusions to cultural/religious themes in order to express a critical stance towards the moralization of carbon reduction activities, as well as towards the market-based strategies
of carbon offsetting and trading (carbon guilt, carbon indulgence).
Although it was beyond the scope of this study to explore specific discourse motivations and aspects of text production with regard to individual compounds, the results of the analysis provide initial insights into the early stages of the online climate change debate in 2007. The highly creative use of the compounds testifies to the fact that blog discussions offer the possibility for concerned individuals to develop their own voices and their own ways of understanding and discussing the proposed scientific and technological solutions to the climate change issue. These sites of engagement, resistance and knowledge construction currently proliferating on the internet offer new ways of thinking about climate change mitigation and its implications, and it is hoped that this article provides a good vantage point for further corpus-assisted studies of this medium.
Nelya Kokeyto Mining the internet for linguistic and social data: An analysis of ‘carbon compounds’ in Web feeds, Discourse & Society, 21(6) 655–674. abstract pdf
