TY - CHAP

T1 - Corpus Linguistics and Geography

T2 - Locating foodbanks in UK media texts using Geographical Text Analysis

AU - Paterson, Laura

AU - Gregory, Ian

PY - 2024/9/2

Y1 - 2024/9/2

N2 - After discussing key developments in corpus approaches to human geography, this chapter draws on two multimillion-word corpora of news articles from the Guardian and the Daily Mail (2010-2015) to continue and develop our work on discourses of UK poverty. Using a case study focused on foodbanks, we interrogate how the UK media locate foodbanks across the four nations (England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland) at local and national level. In doing so we demonstrate how techniques from corpus linguistics and geographical information systems (GIS) can be combined to perform spatial analysis of textual data. This interdisciplinary use of corpus linguistics tools allows us to answer questions such as: What locations are associated with foodbanks by the mainstream UK press? Do these locations correspond to areas where foodbanks cluster and/or statistical measures of foodbank use? What discourses area associated with the use of foodbanks in the areas highlighted by the UK press? Our analysis shows both how a consideration of place can inform corpus-based discourse analysis and how geographical text analysis can be fruitful for comparing textual data to official statistics, such as Carstairs scores and government-produced worklessness data, etc. By contrasting the spatial data gleaned from the corpus analysis with other traditionally quantitative sources, we demonstrate how each type of data presents different realities (and discourses) of UK foodbank use.

AB - After discussing key developments in corpus approaches to human geography, this chapter draws on two multimillion-word corpora of news articles from the Guardian and the Daily Mail (2010-2015) to continue and develop our work on discourses of UK poverty. Using a case study focused on foodbanks, we interrogate how the UK media locate foodbanks across the four nations (England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland) at local and national level. In doing so we demonstrate how techniques from corpus linguistics and geographical information systems (GIS) can be combined to perform spatial analysis of textual data. This interdisciplinary use of corpus linguistics tools allows us to answer questions such as: What locations are associated with foodbanks by the mainstream UK press? Do these locations correspond to areas where foodbanks cluster and/or statistical measures of foodbank use? What discourses area associated with the use of foodbanks in the areas highlighted by the UK press? Our analysis shows both how a consideration of place can inform corpus-based discourse analysis and how geographical text analysis can be fruitful for comparing textual data to official statistics, such as Carstairs scores and government-produced worklessness data, etc. By contrasting the spatial data gleaned from the corpus analysis with other traditionally quantitative sources, we demonstrate how each type of data presents different realities (and discourses) of UK foodbank use.

M3 - Chapter (peer-reviewed)

BT - Handbook of Corpus Linguistics

A2 - Brookes, Gavin

A2 - Mahlberg, Michaela

PB - Bloomsbury

CY - London

ER -