The Wikipedia Talk Page on the EU - ¿It looks like a country, smells like a country, tastes like a country¿¿

Beschreibung

This project examines the Socio-Cognitive Representations (SCRs) of the EU on the English Wikipedia. As part of this project, both the article on the EU and its Talk Page (TP) are examined. While the EU has received considerable attention in (critical) discourse studies for decades (e.g. Fløttum, 2013; Hardt-Mautner, 1995; Wodak & Fairclough, 2010), private individuals’ attempts to make sense of this suis generis (Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2015a) when faced with the task of defining the EU have hardly been touched upon. Furthermore, the effect of changes to the EU over time and, in general, world events on private individuals’ conceptions of the EU also have not received due attention in past research. Apart from this, the collaboratively-created online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is still an underresearched topic in applied linguistics despite already having proved to have considerable societal impact (Jordan, 2014). Shortly after Wikipedia’s inception in 2001, contributors created an entry entitled “European Union”. Since then, contributors have been negotiating which aspects to include/exclude in an encyclopaedic text committed to the Neutral Point of View (Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2015b). Thus, the website affords the unique opportunity to investigate a, which aspects of the EU Wikipedians have grappled with in the Talk Page discussions and b, which tentative conclusions they have arrived at in the article after more than a decade of discussion. The specialised corpus compiled from Wikipedia-data is investigated with the aim of achieving a “rich and detailed perspective” on the past and present constructions/representations of the EU, that is, the given study presents a corpus-assisted (critical) discourse analysis (McEnery & Wilson, 2001).

Zeitraum	11 Apr. 2016
Ereignistitel	English Research Seminar
Veranstaltungstyp	Keine Angaben
Bekanntheitsgrad	National