Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis – and introduction to tool critizism

Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis – and introduction to tool critizism

In this video, Drs. Stephanie Vie and Jennifer deWinter explain some of the tools digital humanists can use for critical discourse analysis and visualization of data collected from social media platforms. Although not all the tools they mention are open source, the majority of them have free to use or freemium versions, including AntConc, a free-to-use concordancing tool, or several Twitter data visualisation tools such as Tweeps map or Tweetstats.

Even though the video does not provide just-as-good open source alternatives to Atlas.ti or MAXQDA (an obviously a recurrent question or shortcoming that is recurrently discussed on OpenMethods), it sets an excellent example for how to introduce tool criticism in the classroom alongside introduction to certain Digital Humanities Tools. After briefly touching upon both advantages and disadvantages of each tool, they encourage their audience (students in Digital Humanities study programs) to pilot each of them by using the same data-set and not only compare their results but also reflect on the epistemic processes in-between.

Sharing the video on Humanities Commons with stable archiving, DOI and rich metadata is among the best things that could happen to teaching resources of all kinds.