ABSTRACT
The past decade has seen a surge in digitisation. Web-based access to digital sources has widened, coupled with advances in general-purpose technologies for the automated processing of digital documents. Searches in web archives, networking in social media, marketing targeting web users, virtual financial transactions, or international cyber intelligence and policing: contemporary social practices rely on digital documents and their automated processing. This is also true for politics and the involvement of language in political struggles. Politics is more radically being subjected to the logics and technological trends of mass mediation. It comes as no surprise then that corpus analysis, with its potential to work with large numbers of digital texts, has become popular beyond the confines of computational and corpus linguistics. Notably, in linguistic discourse studies, using collections of digital texts and specialised analytical software has become something of a must. Pushed by new technologies, traditions of automated textual analysis, such as computer-aided content analysis and lexicometrics, have been revived in the social sciences, too. Corpus analysis, more precisely: the semi-automated analysis of numerical-linguistic patterns in a specified text collection, promises to link these traditions to current technological and social trends. 1
