ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses basic heuristic steps for explorative and unsupervised computational text research in current online environments – a form of 'corpus-assisted discourse studies'. It examines several popular methods for researchers to gather, prepare, sort and analyse online data, and offer suggestions to fix the vacillation between so-called 'distant' and 'close' reading strategies – not for the purpose of prediction or classification, but for a straightforward textual interpretation. The chapter engages with the questions of scope, prioritisation, transformation and representation that come with such an interpretative back-and-forth. It opens with a discussion of the context and broader epistemological questions of online text analysis before investigating a case study, taken from the relatively new digital contexts for travel writing. The chapter outlines several procedures for scraping, pre-processing and analysing an online data repository using Python – although no actual code will be depicted and no prior exposition to Python is needed.
