Procedure for identifying points of disagreement.
When you look for controversies, search where [...] everyone is shouting and quarreling (Venturini 2010, 262).
Identifying debates in a web corpus of over 4 million words and a scholarly corpus of over 400 scholarly articles limits the practicality of manually reading and identifying debates. Thus, we developed a 3-stage research protocol to streamline this process:
1) Searching for “disagreement terms” in the corpus.
2) Using the disagreement terms to extract quotes articulating debates in the corpus.
3) Organizing and visualizing issues, positions, and actors into DebateGraph.
Inspired by Venturini (2010) to search for controversies where “everyone is shouting and quarreling”, we searched for and identified debates by creating a “Concordance of Disagreement Terms”, which was used to search for articulated debates text searches. The “Concordance of Disagreement Terms” included words that might signal disagreements or controversies in the corpus:
argue, concern, conflict, contend, contest, controversy, debate, deliberate, differ, disagree, dispute, fight, misconception, misunderstand, oppose.
The Concordance of Disagreement included all stems for each term. For example, searches for 'argue' included argue, argument, arguing, etc.