No keyword is an island: in search of covert associations

Abstract

This paper describes how corpus-assisted discourse analysis based on keyword identification and interpretation can benefit from employing Market Basket Analysis (mba) after keyword extraction. mba is a data mining technique used originally in marketing that can reveal consistent associations between items in a shopping cart, but also between keywords in a corpus of many texts. By identifying recurring associations between keywords, we can compensate for the lack of wider context which is a major issue impeding the interpretation of isolated keywords (especially when analysing large data). To showcase the advantages of mba in ‘re-contextualising’ keywords within the discourse, we conducted a pilot study on the topic of migration, contrasting anti-system and centre-right Czech Internet media. The results show that mba is useful in identifying the dominant strategy of anti-system news portals: to weave in a confounding ideological undercurrent and connect the concept of migrants to a multitude of other topics (i.e., flooding the discourse).