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Chapter 7. Constructing corpora from images and text

An introduction to Visual Constituent Analysis
  • Alex Christiansen , William Dance and Alexander Wild
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Corpus Approaches to Social Media
This chapter is in the book Corpus Approaches to Social Media

Abstract

Visual analysis represents a significant oversight in the corpus literature, and possibly one that may lead to unintended omissions, particularly when analysing social media. In this chapter we introduce Visual Constituent Analysis (VCA), a method of multimodal corpus construction that allows researchers to construct and analyse visual aspects of online media in large-scale corpora. The chapter addresses the shortcomings of a purely textual approach to discourse analysis when dealing with social media texts and offers a solution using computer ‘Vision’-based image annotation (in our case Google Cloud Vision). Finally, we demonstrate how our approach can be used to analyse a sample of 150,000 micro-blog posts from Twitter and show the difference in level of user interaction with combined image/texts over language-only social media texts.

Abstract

Visual analysis represents a significant oversight in the corpus literature, and possibly one that may lead to unintended omissions, particularly when analysing social media. In this chapter we introduce Visual Constituent Analysis (VCA), a method of multimodal corpus construction that allows researchers to construct and analyse visual aspects of online media in large-scale corpora. The chapter addresses the shortcomings of a purely textual approach to discourse analysis when dealing with social media texts and offers a solution using computer ‘Vision’-based image annotation (in our case Google Cloud Vision). Finally, we demonstrate how our approach can be used to analyse a sample of 150,000 micro-blog posts from Twitter and show the difference in level of user interaction with combined image/texts over language-only social media texts.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Introduction. The expanding landscape of corpus-based studies of social media language 1
  4. Part 1. Using corpus methods to investigate communities on social media
  5. Chapter 1. Towards a digital sociolinguistics 15
  6. Chapter 2. The control and censorship of linguistic resources in an online Community of Practice 41
  7. Chapter 3. Talking about women 63
  8. Part II. Linguistic variation in short social media texts
  9. Chapter 4. Patterns of intra-individual variation in a Swiss WhatsApp corpus 89
  10. Chapter 5. Using lengthwise scaling to compare feature frequencies across text lengths on Reddit 111
  11. Chapter 6. Double trouble 131
  12. Part III. The role of images
  13. Chapter 7. Constructing corpora from images and text 149
  14. Chapter 8. Working with images and emoji in the 🦆 Dukki Facebook Corpus 175
  15. Part IV. Discussion
  16. Chapter 9. New developments in corpus approaches to social media 199
  17. Index 209
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.98.07chr

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Introduction. The expanding landscape of corpus-based studies of social media language 1
  4. Part 1. Using corpus methods to investigate communities on social media
  5. Chapter 1. Towards a digital sociolinguistics 15
  6. Chapter 2. The control and censorship of linguistic resources in an online Community of Practice 41
  7. Chapter 3. Talking about women 63
  8. Part II. Linguistic variation in short social media texts
  9. Chapter 4. Patterns of intra-individual variation in a Swiss WhatsApp corpus 89
  10. Chapter 5. Using lengthwise scaling to compare feature frequencies across text lengths on Reddit 111
  11. Chapter 6. Double trouble 131
  12. Part III. The role of images
  13. Chapter 7. Constructing corpora from images and text 149
  14. Chapter 8. Working with images and emoji in the 🦆 Dukki Facebook Corpus 175
  15. Part IV. Discussion
  16. Chapter 9. New developments in corpus approaches to social media 199
  17. Index 209
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