Tracking, exploring and analyzing recent developments in German-language online press in the face of the coronavirus crisis: cOWIDplus Analysis and cOWIDplus Viewer
This work addresses the need for accessible tools to monitor linguistic shifts in German media during the pandemic, primarily for researchers and the public, but it is incremental as it builds on existing corpus analysis methods.
The researchers tackled the problem of tracking language changes in German online press during the coronavirus crisis by creating three interconnected resources: an RSS corpus with frequency lists, a static HTML page for vocabulary diversity tracking, and a web application for public exploration, enabling analysis without technical expertise.
The coronavirus pandemic may be the largest crisis the world has had to face since World War II. It does not come as a surprise that it is also having an impact on language as our primary communication tool. We present three inter-connected resources that are designed to capture and illustrate these effects on a subset of the German language: An RSS corpus of German-language newsfeeds (with freely available untruncated unigram frequency lists), a static but continuously updated HTML page tracking the diversity of the used vocabulary and a web application that enables other researchers and the broader public to explore these effects without any or with little knowledge of corpus representation/exploration or statistical analyses.