DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7257709
title: MIGR-TWIT Corpus. Migration Tweets of right and far-right politics in Europe

description: <strong>Description</strong> The <strong>MIGR-TWIT Corpus</strong> is a multilingual corpus of tweets about the topic of migration in Europe. Within the framework of the collaborative research project OLiNDiNUM (Observatoire LINguistique du DIscours NUMérique, Linguistic Observatory of Online Debate) the MIGR-TWIT Corpus is created with the aim of developing language databases of online debate. Considering the global issue of migration in line with British and French political contexts of last dozen years from 2011 to 2022, the corpus consists of two sub-corpora: <strong>FR-R-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2022 Corpus </strong>for French language data (1 January 2011 - 30 June 2022) and <strong>UK-R-MIGR-RA-TWIT-2012-2022 Corpus </strong>for English language data (1 January 2012 - 5 September 2022) <strong> </strong> Using the Twitter API v2 Academic Research, tweets containing at least one occurrence of migration or refugee related words are retrieved automatically from 28 right and far-right political figures and parties. The whole corpus contains 18,233 tweets and 533,198 words. <strong>Scientific reference: </strong>Pietrandrea, P., Battaglia, E. (2022). “Migrants and the EU”. The diachronic construction of ad hoc categories in French far-right discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 192, 139-157. <strong> </strong> <strong>Contents</strong> The whole corpus contains two CSV Zip files (tab-delimited format) corresponding to each sub-corpus. The complete corpus is presented in two versions, one version with the tweet identifier (<strong><em>data__id</em></strong>) and the text of the tweet (<strong><em>data__text</em></strong>) as a header (folders named <em>FR-R-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2022_textonly</em> and <em>UK-R-MIGR-RA-TWIT-2012-2022_textonly</em>, respectively composed of 12 and 11 Zip files of every single year), and the other version with all tweet fields information included as a header, such as the posting date (<em><strong>data__created__at</strong></em>), the username (<strong><em>author__name</em></strong>), the number of retweets (<em><strong>data__public_metrics__retweet_count</strong></em>), etc., with two folders named <em>FR-R-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2022_meta</em> and <em>UK-R-MIGR-RA-TWIT-2012-2022_meta</em>. Detailed information for each sub-corpus is illustrated below. <strong>1. FR-R-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2022 </strong> <strong>Created at: </strong>2022-08-08 <strong>Language: </strong>FR<strong> </strong> <strong>Coverage: </strong>16 user accounts; 11,761 tweets; 358,491 words <strong>Time of data collection: </strong>start=2011-01-01; end=2022-06-30 <strong>Keywords: </strong>words derived from a latin root “<em><strong>migr</strong></em>” of <em>migrare</em> <strong>Corpus composition: </strong> <strong>FR-R-MIGR-TWIT Corpus Composition</strong> Political figure/party Username Tweets Year concerned 1 Michel Barnier @MichelBarnier 31 2017-22 2 Valérie Pécresse @vpecresse 81 2017-22 3 Rassemblement National @RNational_off 3,347 2017-22 4 Nicolas Dupont-aignan @dupontaignan 663 2011-22 5 Éric Ciotti @ECiotti 1,007 2012-22 6 Christian Estrosi @cestrosi 137 2011-22 7 Marine Le Pen @MLP_officiel 1,650 2011-22 8 Valérie Boyer @valerieboyer13 837 2012-22 9 Florian Philippot @f_philippot 485 2012-22 10 Xavier Bertrand @xavierbertrand 70 2017-22 11 Marion Maréchal @MarionMarechal 479 2012-17,19-22 12 Philippe Meunier @Meunier_Ph 245 2013-22 13 Jordan Bardella @J_Bardella 1,095 2013-22 14 Nicolas Bay @NicolasBay_ 1,260 2017-22 15 Emmanuel Macron @EmmanuelMacron 72 2017-22 16 Éric Zemmour @ZemmourEric 302 2019-22 17 Jean Messiha* Banned from Twitter (since July 2021) Political figures and parties of table above are listed in chronological order according to the dates on which they posted their first tweet. <strong>*</strong>Before the launching of Twitter API v2 Academic Research, migr-tweets were collected from the database of Europresse.com including 1,453 tweets of Jean Messiha as part of the reference study (Pietrandrea & Battaglia 2022). However, the Twitter account in question has been permanently banned since July 2021. For our data collection using the Twitter API started in September 2021, we could not access this account. Therefore, we decided not to include his tweets in the FR-R-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2022 for the sake of consistency with the rest of twitter data that are automatically retrieved. The sub-corpus FR-R-MIGR-TWIT-2017-2022 is developed, annotated and analyzed as part of a doctoral thesis in progress (Jeon, S.) with the aim of studying the semantic construction of migr-lexicon over the 5-year-period between two recent French Presidential Elections. <strong> </strong> <strong>2. UK-R-MIGR-RA-TWIT-2012-2022 </strong> <strong>Created at: </strong>2022-09-06 <strong>Language: </strong>EN <strong>Coverage: </strong>12 user accounts; 6,472 tweets; 174,707 words <strong>Time of data collection: </strong>start=2012-01-01; end=2022-09-05 <strong>Keywords: </strong>words derived from a latin root “<strong><em>migr</em></strong>” of <em>migrare </em>in addition to the keywords “<strong><em>refugee</em></strong>(<strong><em>s</em></strong>)” and “<strong><em>asylum</em></strong>”. <strong>Corpus composition:</strong> <strong>UK-R-MIGR-RA-TWIT Corpus Composition</strong> Political figure/party Username Tweets Year concerned 1 David Cameron @David_Cameron 32 2012-22 2 Amber Rudd @AmberRuddUK 29 2012-22 3 Sajid Javid @sajidjavid 84 2012-22 4 Boris johnson @BorisJohnson 80 2015-22 5 Priti Patel @pritipatel 304 2012-22 6 UK Home Office @ukhomeoffice 909 2012-22 7 Nigel Farage @Nigel_Farage 1,010 2012-22 8 Richard Tice @TiceRichard 180 2013-22 9 UKIP @UKIP 2,746 2012-22 10 Neil Hamilton @NeilUKIP 252 2013-22 11 Nick Griffin @NickGriffinBU 542 2012-22 12 Robin Tilbrook @RobinTilbrook 304 2012-22 2 out of 12 accounts are official accounts belonging to the” UK Home Office” department and the “UKIP” (United Kingdom Independence Party) party. 10 out of 12 accounts are political figures’ accounts. The corpus UK-R-MIGR-RA-TWIT-2012-2022 will be exploited for the following master’s thesis: Guido Blandino, <em>10 years of public debate on immigration: combining topic modeling and corpus linguistics to examine the British (far-)right discourse on Twitter</em>, MA University of Wolverhampton (2023)
description: Funding acknowledgements: - Université de Lille, Projet d'Internationalisation 2021 - Université Franco-italienne / Università Italo Francese - Campus France (Hubert Curien Partnerships): Italie - PHC Galilée 2018-19 ; Bay-Bas - PHC Van Gogh 2018-19
description: {"references": ["Pietrandrea, P., Battaglia, E. (2022). \"Migrants and the EU\". The diachronic construction of ad hoc categories in French far-right discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 192, 139-157.", "Pietrandrea, P., Battaglia, E. (2019). La costruzione et l'introduzione implicita di entit\u00e0 categoriali ad hoc nel discorso sui migranti e sull'Europa. Workshop \"Gli impliciti come mezzo di persuasione\", LIII Congresso Internazionale della Societ\u00e0 di Linguistica italiana, Universit\u00e0 dell'Insubria, Como, 19\u201321 September 2019.", "Battaglia, E., Jeon, S. (2021). \u00c9tudier le discours online de la droite fran\u00e7aise sur l'immigration: le corpus FrRMigr\u2013Twit et ses applications. UMR 8163 STL, Universit\u00e9 de Lille, 16 December 2021.", "Blandino, G. (Manuscript in preparation). 10 years of public debate on immigration: combining topic modeling and corpus linguistics to examine the British (far-)right discourse on Twitter, MA thesis University of Wolverhampton.", "Jeon, S. (Manuscript in preparation). Le discours de haine sur le web. Analyse linguistique et sociolinguistique (Online Hate Speech. Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Analyses). PhD thesis, Universit\u00e9 de Tours."]}