Positioning Goes to Work: Computer-Aided Identification of Stance Shifts and Semantic Themes in Electronic Discourse Analysis

This discussion presents two specific computer-aided techniques that allow researchers to combine quantitative and qualitative approaches to the discourse analysis of electronically-searchable text. It illustrates the application of these techniques and their supporting tools to a range of online interactions, including brief reference to entries in online tourism blogs and Facebook comments, in order to provide nuanced interpretations of electronic discourse: (1) stance-shift analysis, a software-based analysis keyed to tagged parts of speech (POS) to identify when speakers/writers shift among evaluative and affective stances to topic, to prompts, and to other participants in communicative interactions; (2) semantic domain analysis using WMatrix®, an online corpus analysis package including UCREL Semantic Analysis System, which tags words by semantic domains, and uses a log-likelihood calculator to identify significant semantic relationships across texts. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-4426-7.ch018