ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the features and subsequent corpus approaches to analysing forms of online communication that are distinct from, or have built on, approaches developed with respect to other modes of communication. Drawing on a concept originally developed in the context of ecological psychology, the online communicative environment presents a number of ‘affordances’ for language users. The chapter reviews corpus studies of online communication considering online registers, structural features and interactional elements of online communication. It outlines some of the features of online communication as they have been identified and examined through corpus analysis. A thorough application of corpus methods is demonstrated in M. Zappavigna’s Discourses of Twitter and Social Media. Many forms of online communication are image-based, particularly on social media and Zappavigna has discussed what she terms the ‘social photograph’. Zappavigna developed a manual coding scheme that became searchable through an image annotation software tool.
