Analyzing Electronic Texts

Today, written texts are one of the most popular ways of communicating with others. It can be seen in emails, texts, letters, or simply through the social media. Written texts range from formal texts, informational texts, or through statuses in the social media. The use of the internet continues to grow each day. More people are becoming obsessed with updating people about their lives as well as using the web to expand their knowledge. Through the web people are able to communicate with millions of others through websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.

The internet is filled with millions of articles, electronic texts, books, etc. These are several of the different forms of texts that we are offered online which have become very helpful to the vast majority of people. Professor of English Language and Linguistics, Svenja Adolph’s, wrote Introducing Electronic Text Analysis  to present the study of text and discourse carried out with the use of computers. She explains how we use computers to analyze electronic texts through the language used. Technology continues to improve and we are introduced with many resources that can help make this possible by analyzing texts and the languages used. Analyzing texts can also be referred as corpus linguistics which is an important part of research projects as well as the different types of languages people use when communicating. She explains,

“access to computer resources and electronic texts has led to a considerable change in the way in which research in the arts and humanities and in the social sciences had been conducted over the past two decades” (9)

Corpus linguistics helps one understand the information and use of language available to us. It amazes me how the web consists of so much data that cannot be analyzed by a human being but rather through a software program. These programs find trends, word frequencies, patterns, and word lists that are commonly used. Many of these subtexts have personal meanings behind the words used.

 Before reading the first three chapters of Adolph’s book, I never really knew so much work went behind the language used in electronic texts. It is an interesting subject that I hope to learn much more of.