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From Mums to Incels: Gender and internet identity analysis through Corpus Linguistics Eloise Parr, 2nd Year, PhD English Language and Linguistics, University of Birmingham
What is corpus linguistics? Corpus linguistics is the study of language that involves using computer software to perform empirical analysis. It is a particularly useful methodology because it can show patterns in language about what is most salient or notable in the data. Corpus software can be used to analyse grammatical features, key words or phrases, or even semantic usage. Corpus analysis uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques by collecting and analysing further information from your data such as the frequency of particular linguistic features occurring in a text or set of texts[1]. The results of a quantitative word frequency analysis (how many times a certain word or phrase occurs in the corpus) should systematically identify word usage and distribution, whereas a qualitative analysis allows for an analysis of word meaning[2][3]. Corpus analysis is helpful in building vast collections of language for large lexical and grammatical studies, as well as more applied subfields of linguistic analysis such as discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, language teaching and learning, and forensic linguistics[4]. One notable use of corpus analysis is to explore how gender is discussed and presented in online spaces on the internet, in particular, online forums. There has been a plethora of research into the language used by users of gendered forums, particularly in recent years. This has been aided by corpus linguistics as language data can be scraped from the web in minutes, which means the language is often much more fresh and recent than printed language (which can take months or years to collect, edit and publish). Some of this research will be discussed below.
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Mumsnet as a women’s online space Mumsnet was created in 2000 as an online space for parents, especially mothers, and a safe space for those with shared experiences of pregnancy and motherhood to gain a sense of belonging and community[5]. It is commonly used to gain support and share parental knowledge and advice, although there are forum threads on topics outside of pregnancy and parenthood, including politics, relationships, health, and the media. Although there are some male users, the majority of Mumsnet’s community are women. This makes it a gendered online space and therefore of particular interest for researchers interested in exploring the ways in which female and feminine identities are negotiated and presented in the digital age. A study in 2021 by Kinloch and Jaworska[6] explored the ways in which women conceptualise their maternal bodies whilst having postnatal depression, with a backdrop of (often sexist) societal norms and expectations. They did this by collecting a corpus of nearly 5 million words from Mumsnet Talk forum threads that contained the terms postnatal depression or pnd. The researchers then used corpus software to identify the keywords and key semantic fields in the dataset. A keyword is a word whose occurrence and frequency is statistically significant when compared to a reference corpus (often a much larger corpus that is used to represent natural language in a number of different contexts). If a word is a keyword, it therefore means it is unusual in wider language and may indicate something specific about the language or topic of the corpus under examination. This allowed the researchers to find out which words and semantic fields were significant in the discussion of postnatal depression between the women in the Mumsnet forum threads, and identify patterns in a much larger dataset than would be possible with simply manual analysis.
