Description

Keywords: signposts to objectivity?

Keywords offer discourse analysts a corpus-driven method of identifying salient lexical items in corpora, thus directing researchers towards interesting discursive elements in texts that they may not have noticed. Therefore, the technique has the potential to enable a more objective form of analysis, and in this talk I demonstrate how an examination of the keyword Moslem in a corpus of news articles about Islam, was revealing in terms of how particular newspapers position themselves.

However, in order to subject the keywords process to a more reflexive form of analysis, I revisit six of my own studies which have used this technique, asking questions which include: what proportion of keywords obtained did I analyse, what actually constituted an "analysis" and what decisions resulted in certain keywords receiving much more attention than others? The results raise further questions about how confidently we can claim objectivity in this form of analysis, at least for my own research. This is not to say that keywords should be abandoned as a methodological tool, but researchers should consider the benefits of a giving a more reflexive account of their own decision making procedures around keywords.

See http://www3.lingue.unibo.it/blog/clb/?p=287 for more details about the conference.