Introduction

This chapter introduces the contextual information that guides the aim of the volume, that of proposing a broad view of corpus approaches able to include those notions and mechanisms that – while not classically associated with natural language – are foundational of the digital environments in which language production and exchanges occur and that represent the core of the techniques that are used to produce, collect, and process digital textual data. Working with data from social media poses in fact a number of digital-related implications whose complexity often falls beyond the scope of corpus linguistics, and considering the relevance that social media have acquired, the changes that digital environments produce to information, cognition, communication, and cooperation need to be taken into account to correctly approach digital textual data. After a brief discussion on the role played by digital humanities in this effort, attention is devoted to expound how corpus linguistics has historically investigated cognitive and social dynamics through the analysis of digital textual data. Last, the general outline and aims of the book are detailed.