Covid NZ Twitter Corpus
The Covid NZ Twitter (CovidNZT) Corpus consists of 40,243 tweets posted between 22 February and 10 November 2020, 1,000 of which have been manually coded. All tweets contain the hashtag #covid19nz, including variations with one or more capital letters. The aim of the project is to study linguistic strategies which tweeters use to express their viewpoints and stance in Covid-related tweets. In particular, one of our points of interests is the use of directives.
If you would like to talk to us about this project, please email Andreea Calude.
Downloading the CovidNZT Corpus
The CovidNZT Twitter Corpus can be downloaded here. In accordance with Twitter's terms of service, we can only provide the raw tweet IDs; however, we also include a script for extracting the tweets via the Twitter API. Please follow the instructions in readme.txt.
Publications
- Burnette, J., & Long, M. (2022). Bubbles and lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand: the language of self-isolation in #Covid19NZ tweets. Medical Humanities. doi: 10.1136/medhum-2022-012401
- Burnette, J., & Calude, A. S. (2022). Wake up New Zealand! Directives, politeness and stance in Twitter #Covid19NZ posts. Journal of Pragmatics, 196, 6-23. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2022.05.002
Media Attention
- RNZ Interview, The Linguistics of Lockdown, 16 August 2022
- TVNZ Interview on Seven Sharp, Social media, pandemics, and the way we talk (only accessible to NZ viewers), 3 August 2022
- Article in The Conversation, We analysed NZ Twitter users’ language during lockdown – with surprising results, 27 July 2022
Team
Funding
We graciously acknowledge the generous support of:
- The ALPSS Collaboration Grant
