Abstract
Revisiting the Toolbox of Discourse Studies presents a wide variety of approaches to discourse analysis, particularly focusing on the relationship between theoretical claims and the employed tools. The nine core chapters are divided into two parts. Part 1 (chapters 2–6) covers the central theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches in the field that Rheindorf labels “Critical Discourse Studies” (CDS). Part 2 is formed of four case studies (chapters 7–10) that revisit Rheindorf’s previous work with a fresh theoretical perspective and/or new analytical methods.
In chapter 2, Rheindorf argues that research should specifically explain the “value” of mixing particular qualitative and quantitative methods to “avoid vague declarations of ‘synergy’ or ‘building bridges’” (p. 22). He discusses shortcomings of over-reliance on corpora, including a lack of context and “lexical bias” (p. 64), but also warns of too “shallow” integrations of corpus methods in CDS (p. 53). Rheindorf especially stresses the importance of transparency when reporting concordance analyses (a point that has also been made by Jeffries and Walker, 2018, for example). Chapter 3 cautions that corpus methods may increase the tendency of CDS research to rely on written data. The chapter discusses best practices of multimodal analysis, emphasizing the need to learn from the relevant disciplines to avoid “reinventing the wheel” and “linguistic imperialism” (pp. 111–112). In chapter 4, Rheindorf introduces different models of discourse levels, covering, for example, the text under study as well as situational and wider socio-political contexts. He encourages researchers to explain their view of discourse structure and warns of contradictions between theoretical frameworks and data collection/analysis. Chapter 5, on diachronic analysis, discusses theories of the links between social and discursive change, and various discursive patterns (e.g. normalization and mediatization). Methodologically, Rheindorf reiterates the importance of choosing the methods (like segmentation types) in line with a study’s theoretical framework. In chapter 6, on visualization, Rheindorf draws on the work from other fields like data visualization (DataVis) and Visual Analytics (p. 223) because this area has to date received relatively little attention in CDS. He appeals to CDS scholars to use visualization not only in the presentation of findings but also in the analysis and interpretation stages, facilitating triangulation. The chapter links visualization to open science movements, arguing that interactive dashboards can allow readers to actively engage with the underlying data.
Part 2 begins with chapter 7, the first case study, which revisits the interview data of 2nd generation returnees to Austria (e.g. Wodak and Rheindorf, 2017). Building on the linguistic patterns and narrator positioning originally identified via keyword analysis, Rheindorf adds a qualitative analysis of roles in the narratives. He manually categorizes verbs according to Systemic Functional Linguistic process types, which he then quantifies and visualizes to reveal wider narrative patterns in the interviews in a network (e.g. between the parents as central actors and their perpetrators, places, the narrative I, etc.). Chapter 8 examines the normalization of populist terms in Austrian political discourse, focusing on discussions of integration. Rheindorf here extends his previous work (see e.g. Rheindorf, 2018) by using a much larger corpus, covering a longer period and wider range of texts. To complement the original lexical focus, he adds a qualitative argumentation analysis of rhetorical links, checking which political claims were questioned by the media. Chapter 9 focuses on the Austrian media representation of the 2015/16 “refugee crisis”. While the original project (published partly in Rheindorf and Wodak, 2020) concentrated on consistent collocates (following Gabrielatos and Baker, 2008), the author here changes the focus to short-term discursive change. He also adds a new qualitative focus on legitimation strategies to consider a wider context. This analysis leads to an overview of the topoi used in the media, along with the paraphrases of the attached arguments. The final case study (chapter 10) is concerned with the diachronic development of early 20th century, multilingual film theory publications. The chapter expands the original data (see e.g. Rheindorf, 2005) beyond the canonical texts to balance genres across decades and adds a quantitative dimension based on a fully translated corpus. The new study also uses interactive matrix and network visualizations to highlight the relationships between qualitatively identified topoi of “film as language” (p. 352). Chapter 11 offers brief “Concluding Remarks”. Returning to the image of a toolbox, Rheindorf reasons that how we use the tools of data collection, analysis, visualization and presentation “defines what we do when we conduct discourse studies” (p. 372).
Revisiting the Toolbox of Discourse Studies is thorough in its presentation of a variety of theoretical frameworks. The book not only engages with the work of influential scholars like Gerlinde Mautner and Paul Baker, but also calls attention to research that may not so well-known to a wider English-language readership (for example the “Duisburg School”, pp. 151–155; see e.g. Jäger and Jäger, 2007). The non-linguistic references on visualization are also refreshing, although the explanation of visualization types in section 6.5 would have benefited from some sample plots. Overall, the discussion of theoretical frameworks and their implications seem to outweigh original analysis. While the case studies show interesting combinations of qualitative and quantitative methods, I would have liked to see more analysis earlier on, and more hands-on engagement with multimodal data. The book’s strong argument for more transparency in CDS, however, is important and timely. It is supported by suggestions for research design and practice at the end of each core chapter. The companion website provides additional tables and figures, for example of keywords, collocates, verb process types and source texts. Given the author’s passionate calls for open science in CDS, I had hoped to find hyperlinks to corpus data in an external repository (e.g. GitHub, the Linguistic Data Consortium or the Open Science Framework). Nevertheless, the two impressive interactive visualizations for chapter 10 do allow a much more in-depth exploration of the data than would be possible with the printed graphs in the book.
In sum, Revisiting the Toolbox of Discourse Studies is a well-researched contribution to the literature on theory and methodology in discourse analysis. The book requires some knowledge of discourse analysis and is therefore suitable for advanced students and scholars. Individual chapters can, however, easily be assigned for course reading, as they include separate bibliographies. With its appeals for transparency, the book reminds us that the theoretical standpoints must be in sync with the methods we apply.