Mining the internet for linguistic and social data: An analysis of ‘carbon compounds’ in Web feeds

The potential of the Web for applied linguistic research is being increasingly recognized. As the internet is a particularly valuable source of data on recent changes in meaning, Mautner (2005b) made a plea for more discourse analysts to work with Web-based texts in order to study important social developments. Taking up this suggestion, this article introduces an approach based on the analysis of recent updates to Web-based sources. A special purpose corpus, compiled from Web feeds containing so-called lexical ‘carbon compounds’, such as, for example, carbon credit, carbon diet, carbon sinner, is studied with corpus linguistic tools to explore the online dimension of the interpretative struggle around the issue of climate change mitigation. The analysis reveals semantic associations surrounding the compounds and highlights connotational differences that signal both support and criticism of the climate mitigation initiatives proposed by policy makers and environmentalists.