NEWS ON THE WEB CORPUS FOR RESEARCHERS

It is well known that the image of any foreign country is
predominantly formed by mass media. As a rule, not so many
people have the opportunity to visit other countries in order to
form their own opinion about them. So, it is important to monitor
the mass media of other countries in order to know the opinion of
their people about Russia and Russians. The researcher may
choose whether to scroll thousands of news web pages for
necessary for his work information or to use electronic corpora
for the more effective results. Many of e-corpora have special
attribute for search. For example, it is possible to find certain
parts of the speech. It is also possible to compare various things
across different sections of the corpus – either time or country.
Some of these possibilities were used for the paper.
The study is devoted to the analysis of foreign mass media with
the help of the News on the Web e-corpus concerning the attitude
of foreign readers to Russia and Russians by means of a
quantitative calculation of the phrases “Russian + NOUN”. Such
laconic phrase is quite informative, besides the corpus allows you
to view the context in which it was used. The suggestions
expressed in the article are based both on quantitative data and on
the context. The corpus toolkit allows the researcher to look for
the data by year (from 2010 to the present); by selecting countries
(the corpus contains sources from 20 different countries). The
NOW corpus contains hundreds of sources such as: The Guardian
(GB), Fox News (US), National Post (CA), Telegraph.co.uk
(GB), The Nation Newspaper (NG), Times of India (IN), etc. The
peculiarity of this e-corpus lies in its volume and frequency of
replenishment: the NOW corpus contains more than 7 billion
words of the data from web-based newspapers and magazines.
Moreover, the corpus grows by about 300,000 new articles each
month. The NOW corpus belongs to the collection of BYU
corpora of Mark Davies. Basic access to the corpora is free and
that is specifically valuable both for students and for other
researchers. Access is limited by queries per day for different
levels – from 20 for “Unregistered user” to 200 for “Researcher”.
The corpus gives information about number of mentions
‘Russian’ for different countries: the leaders of them are the Great
Britain and the USA. Each country has own order for the phrases
“Russian + NOUN”, but all of them have next to the Russian
such word as: president, government, federation, officials,
interference, ambassador, athletes, intelligence, state, meddling,
diplomats, authorities, spy, hackers, etc. As a part of the research
performed, the top-50 phrases were analyzed in its context. When
analyzing the context, it was revealed that most of the references
relate to world-class events (including the Winter Olympics and
the FIFA World Cup) and to world-class scandals (for example,
doping, sanctions, etc.).
It was found that the image of Russia in foreign mass media is
distorted through the prism of negative news. The mass media
discourse often demonstrates aggression, negativity, verbal
pressure, suggestion, etc. It can be explained by some factors.
Cautious attitude towards Russia remains from the Cold War
period and now it is very difficult for us to overcome
stereotypical models. Moreover, mass media has tendency to
hype something for popularity. Sociological researches of the
country image are of a practical interest and aimed at the analysis
of the social factors influence upon the image formation. It seems
that the research potential of such e-corpora with a large toolbox
could be perfectly useful for sociologists, psychologists, linguists
and for other researchers.
Keywords: corpora, news on the web, Russia, Russian, view
from abroad