ABSTRACT
Austerity cannot be reduced to spending cuts but has to be understood as a complex social phenomenon. As social reality is always mediated, media play a central role within the struggle between different evaluations and constructions of austerity. This edited volume is based on a workshop that took place in September 2017 in Erlangen and that brought together researchers from the computational and social sciences. Central empirical questions concern the ideas, actors, emotions and geographies that are addressed in the multimodal British austerity discourse. To have a really transdisciplinary collaboration on these questions, every contribution is based on the Austerity in British Newspapers Corpus (AuBriN), which consists of approximately 15,000 texts and 289 multimodal articles from The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph in the years 2010 to 2016. This chapter introduces readers to the possibilities and challenges of corpus-assisted discourse analyses and to the production process of the AuBriN corpus.
