Digital methods in practice! Insightful workshop for InterGedi research

We have participated in an all-day hands-on workshop organised by the University of Navarra at its campus in Madrid last Wednesday, 13th November.  The workshop, consisting of three different seminars, was a wonderful opportunity to delve into research methodologies as applied to digital texts and communication online.

The first session, delivered by Eleonora Esposito, from the University of Navarra, focused on critical discourse analysis, and how it can be applied to the study of participatory genres and social networks. Discussion about qualitative approaches to data, such as Thematic Analysis or Sentiment Analysis, were exemplified in Twitter, in this case, to explore discourses related to sociocultural issues of great relevance these days, like politics, feminism and religion.

The first session, delivered by Eleonora Esposito, from the University of Navarra, focused on critical discourse analysis, and how it can be applied to the study of participatory genres and social networks. Discussion about qualitative approaches to data, such as Thematic Analysis or Sentiment Analysis, were exemplified in Twitter, in this case, to explore discourses related to sociocultural issues of great relevance these days, like politics, feminism and religion.

From the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Antonio Fruttaldo talked about corpus linguistics in the second workshop. Apart from revisiting the well-defined criteria in the literature for corpus collection, more problematic issues were introduced, especially, when compiling digital corpora from scratch. He highlighted how corpus studies can and should be combined with other methods to make research more sound and salient. Some of them, which we cover in our current project based on a representative corpus of H2020 research projects, comprise discourse analysis, multimodality and pragmatics. In addition, it was great to have at the end of the session an overview of updated software tools to exploit the linguistic phenomena in a corpus, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Last, but definitely not least, Sole Alba Zollo, from the University of Naples Federico II, approached the basics to carry out multimodal analyses. The practical seminar encouraged us to deal with the grammar of visual design by analysing images and understanding how they contribute to meaning-making. Aspects that came up in the workshop such as participants, distance and angle will surely help us deal with multimodality more effectively in our project. Semiotic phenomena were also a trigger for debate, above all, regarding typography and typopictography.

In short, the event allowed us to update and improve our methods toolkit, which is going to be wonderful too keep on with our investigations. Thank you to the organisers and to the speakers for such a fruitful experience!  Now it is time for work and practice!