Media and Discourse Analysis

Abstract

For both theoretical and logistical reasons, many social scientists turn to media texts—archival newspapers, radio and television broadcasts, podcasts, Twitter feeds, etc.—to understand the society that produced them. It may seem easy, because as a regular consumer and producer of media, you are already constantly analyzing the mediated discourse around you: parsing sentences, assessing the veracity of a claim, and making judgments as to the authority, intelligence, and background of a writer or speaker. But how might you denaturalize your “native” media literacy and go about this in a more systematic and rigorous way? In this hands-on workshop, we will sample some of the key methods for analyzing mediated discourse: transcription, critical discourse analysis, building and working with a corpus, capturing digital circulation, and multimodal analysis. Some examples will come from Russian media, but this workshop is open to all IU graduate students.