Guest editor:

• Thomas Buhler, UMR 6049 ThéMA, Université de Franche-Comté

• Samuel Carpentier-Postel, UMR 6049 ThéMA, Université de Franche-Comté

• Laurent Matthey, Université de Genève

Recently, there has been a wealth of textual data which are becoming increasingly available. Whether it is online media, websites, social networks, or planning documents (Buhler and Lethier, 2019), a vast quantity of data is being uploaded to servers which potentially contains valuable information for the analysis of the discourses of various actors in territorial production (from planners to inhabitants).

At the same time, computer-assisted textual-analysis methods and tools (Lebart and Salem, 1994) have constantly been developed and become more accessible to the academic community. Free open-source tools such as IRAMUTEQ (Ratinaud, 2009) and TXM (Heiden et al 2010) have, for example, greatly facilitated access to software for processing these semantic corpora. Against this background, this issue wishes to take stock of current methods for collecting and analysing semantic data in urban-studies research.

Article proposals can deal with different types of corpora relating to development policies (urban planning documents, documents linked to urban projects, etc.), mainstream media (written press or transcription of other types of media), opinions and representations (questionnaires, interviews, etc.), or indeed social networks. As part of a reflexive approach, articles must spell out the conceptual and methodological challenges inherent in this type of data. Papers discussing issues around data sampling, linguistic annotation (lemmatisation, named entities) and data normalisation, or the management of multilingual and/or aligned corpora are welcome, as are proposals focusing on the analytical challenges posed by transmedia corpora made up of discourses that employ various media.

Contributions must be sent to samuel.carpentier_postel@univ-fcomte.fr before February 1, 2023.

The proposals of article will have to strictly respect the “Authors Guidelines” available at: https://journals.openedition.org/articulo/921.

Timeline