Towards DINEQ: The Corpus of News on Economic Inequality

Abstract

Experts claim UK has experienced a process of growing economic inequality since 1971. Following a socio-constructionist approach, it is assumed in this chapter that, since language helps maintaining or changing power relations in society, newspapers may therefore have contributed to such growing inequality by shaping people’s attitudes and expectations towards different societal issues. My overarching objective is therefore to explore discourse and look for possible discoursal changes (if any) in discussions around wealth inequality in the UK from 1971 onwards. As part of this project, this chapter examines the process of compilation of a large-scale diachronic corpus of newspaper material that will serve for future investigations in discourses around economic inequality in this country since the early 1970s: the Corpus of News on Economic Inequality (DINEQ corpus). Since there is no single available database providing access to the whole period under consideration, the process of compilation of DINEQ will inevitably include the gathering of both text-readable data (temporarily referred to as Dineq_online) and OCR data (temporarily referred to as Dineq_historical). These two types of data imply significant differences from a methodological perspective. The present chapter specifically focuses on the text-readable data gathered through Nexis UK database, with further work still to be done for the completion of DINEQ.