All posts by Grégoire Lacaze

Video ‘Building and Mining Corpora for Social Media Discourse Analysis’

Here is the video of the “‘Channels of Digital Scholarship’ Seminar I: New tools and old questions in the analysis of textual corpora” devoted to ‘Building and Mining Corpora for Social Media Discourse Analysis’. The fourth session of the ‘Channels of Digital
Scholarship’ seminar co-convened by Maison Française d’Oxford and Digital Scholarship @
Oxford was held online on June 1st, 2022.

Chair: Grégoire Lacaze (Aix-Marseille Université)

Keynote speakers:

  • Dr. Bernie Hogan (Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford): “Theorising and integrating platform signals into digital text corpora”
  • Pr. Gudrun Ledegen (Université Rennes 2, Laboratoire PREFICS): “Suicide prevention chat, quantitative and qualitative description of a discourse genre for better listening”

Inaugural session of the seminar on February 3rd 2022

The inaugural session of the ISSMDA seminar will be held on Thursday February 3rd 2022 from 4.30 (French time). Pr. Julien Longhi (CY Cergy Paris Université) will be the first keynote speaker on the following topic:
« Quantifier pour qualifier : l’exploration des corpus numériques comme compréhension des discours des réseaux sociaux »

More info (including the abstract)

It will be an online session that you can follow with Zoom. Here is the registration link: https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJckdOugrD4pG9MLmi2NgzJxeJwNJD0gTVEk

International Seminar on Social Media Discourse Analysis (ISSMDA)

With the increasing popularity of digital publications on social media in recent years, renewed discourse analysis methodologies are needed to describe the various discourses circulating on digital platforms. “Digital discourses” such as posts hosted on social media platforms have some typical characteristics that directly influence the way they should be analysed. Indeed, “traditional” discourse analysis, which is well suited for printed texts, seems somewhat insufficient for analysing “digitally native” posts.

Various approaches, whether they be linguistic, semantic, multimodal or even sociological, have been gradually emerging, offering more appropriate ways of processing and analysing digital posts on social media.


Some specialists of reported speech, such as Francis Grossmann and Laurence Rosier (2018), have shown the importance of renewed approaches for digital discourses, linked to concepts such as hypertextuality, delinearisation, multimodality and polysemioticity.


The need to analyse large corpora of digital posts has become increasingly important and relevant as the impact of such posts on citizens’ daily lives, in terms of discursive strategies and political choices, has become more marked. The proliferation of digital posts on mainstream social media such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram foregrounds the fundamental notion of freedom of speech but also some inevitable undesirable deviations.


The International Seminar on Social Media Discourse Analysis (ISSMDA) aims to offer diverse ways of processing and mining digital posts, thanks to the expertise of scholars and researchers specialising in linguistics, semantics, stylistics and media studies.


This research seminar is co-convened by three founding universities of the European CIVIS university (Aix-Marseille Université, Université libre de Bruxelles and Stockholms universitet) and by Maison Française d’Oxford (University of Oxford, UAR 3129, UMIFRE 11).