Photo: Emma Nortio
Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki Emma Nortio tells us about her ongoing research in which she makes use of the Kielipankki resource Suomi24.
My name is Emma Nortio, I am a PhD researcher at the University of Helsinki in the faculty of social sciences, discipline of social psychology and in the research group of intergroup relations.
In my PhD I examine the Finnish discourse of multiculturalism from the perspective of discursive psychology which is a qualitative approach to which language use, i.e. talk and text that are analyzed as action and as situated in the wider societal context.
My dissertation consists of four substudies in which I analyze e.g. the patterns of talk that people draw from when arguing for and against multiculturalism in group interviews and in online discussions. The analysis of the group interviews focused on patterns of talk on multiculturalism and the negotiations of cultural citizenship. The online discussions led me to the ways in which participants interact with politicians and the media.
The online discussion data of my study comes from a forum called Suomi24.fi, which is available through Kielipankki. It is an enormous data set of which I focused on analyzing a small fraction. The KORP interface made my work a lot easier as it enabled me to search the threads I was interested in. Analyzing the data was a long process because there were several elements I could have focused on. I ended up examining the ways in which the participants of the forum participated in a heated societal discussion on multiculturalism.
Nortio, E. (2018). Vihapuhetta ja vertaistukea – nettikeskustelut tutkimusaineistona. Liikkeessä yli rajojen –blogi. Kirjoitus on luettavissa täällä: https://liikkeessaylirajojen.fi/vihapuhetta-ja-vertaistukea-nettikeskustelut-tutkimusaineistona/.
The FIN-CLARIN consortium consists of a group of Finnish universities along with CSC – IT Center for Science and the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus). FIN-CLARIN helps the researchers in Finland to use, to refine, to preserve and to share their language resources. The Language Bank of Finland is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.
All previously published Language Bank researcher interviews are stored in the Researcher of the Month archive.
