Organize, Manage, and Analyse a Social Media Multimodal Corpus with the Help of CAQDAS. NVivo: A Useful Tool for Digital Discourse Analysis

The rise of social media gave the chance for scholars in Social Sciences and Humanities to create corpus from data available online (Lejeune 2010). The danger, in this way, is collecting big data very difficult to manage with traditional tools and, overall, in the frame of qualitative research. For this reason, it seems important to mobilize digital tools to assist researchers in a reflexive perspective (Schön 1987; 1994): this software is called CAQDAS. The aim of this paper is to articulate a reflection about methodological choice of a sociolinguistic research in a radio professional environment using social media and the use of software to accomplish two important phases of the research: the organization and the analysis of empirical data. This paper shows how to collect, organize, and analyse with a CAQDAS (NVivo) a multimodal corpus of research materials from social media to “analyse the digital discourse” (Paveau 2013). Firstly, we present some topics from the debate about software for the qualitative data analysis and its implication in sociolinguistics. Secondly, we show how we organize and manage a big corpus within a research about social media and radio: we made a focused ethnography at studios of Radio 1 and Radio 3 RAI, Italian national and public radio, in May 2015 in Rome (Italy). We explain, finally, the context, objectives, techniques, methodology of our research and how we used NVivo to analyse our corpus.