Laura L Paterson & Ian N Gregory 
Representations of Poverty and Place [PDF ebook] 
Using Geographical Text Analysis to Understand Discourse

This book explores a novel methodological approach which combines analytical techniques from linguistics and geography to bring fresh insights to the study of poverty. Using Geographical Text Analysis, it maps the discursive construction of poverty in the UK and compares the results to what administrative data reveal. The analysis draws together qualitative and quantitative techniques from corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, Geographical Information Science, and the spatial humanities. By identifying the place-names that occur within close proximity to search terms associated with to poverty it shows how different newspapers use place to foreground different aspects of poverty (including employment, housing, money, and benefits), and how the London-centric nature of newspaper reporting dominates the discursive construction of UK poverty. This book demonstrates how interdisciplinary research methods can illuminate complex social issues and will appeal to researchers in a number of disciplines from sociology, geography and the spatial humanities, economics, linguistics, health, and public policy, in addition to policymakers and practitioners.

Table of Content

Introduction.- Chapter 1: Defining and Measuring Poverty.- Chapter 2: Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Poverty.- Chapter 3: Geographical Information Systems and Textual Sources.- Chapter 4: Conducting GTA using Poverty as a Search Term.- Chapter 5: How to use GTA in discourse analysis.- Chapter 6: Locating (un)employment in the National Press.- Chapter 7: Characterising Poverty in Place: Benefits Receipt in Britain.- Chapter 8: Geography-based Discourses of Poverty.- Conclusions.

About the author

Laura L Paterson is a Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at The Open University, UK.





Ian N Gregory is Professor of Digital Humanities at Lancaster University, UK.