Multi-method Discourse Analysis of Twitter Communication: A Comparison of Two Global Political Issues

Abstract

This chapter presents a multi-method discourse analytical approach to analyse Twitter communication on two political issues of global concern: environmental policy/climate change and internet governance/net neutrality. Their corpus is compiled from Twitter messages containing #NetNeutrality or #ClimateChange which the authors gathered between January and March 2015. First, they map and compare the geographical landscapes of the two policy fields by using geolocation information from the Twitter API and the Data Science Toolkit. Step 2 consists in a comparative network analysis defining Twitter users as nodes and Retweets (RT) and mentions (@) as links. Finally, in a third step, the authors apply keyword analysis to identify discursive patterns. Combining these three methods allows the authors to assess the degree of transnationalisation in the two fields.