Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives for Discourse Analysis in the Digital Sphere

Abstract

Research in political geography has frequently addressed the construction of geo-spatial identities and geopolitical world views in the media. However, the theoretical and methodological implications of digital and social media have barely been considered thus far. Based on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the agencement, we therefore develop a concept of ‘mediated discourse’ to address the relation between the technological-material distribution of articulations across digital space and their symbolic content. We operationalize this concept by combining network analytic and corpus linguistic methods to analyze app. 1.5 million tweets on the German federal election 2017. The network of accounts and retweets we consider exhibits various clusters with different degrees of interconnectivity that are characterized by different logics of meaning production. We focus our analysis on right-wing populist and extreme right articulations, and on the related topic of migration, a topic that was central to the discourse surrounding the elections. We show how discursive logics differ considerably in different parts of the media space and conclude by outlining future perspectives for discourse research in the digital sphere.