Abstract—This paper presents the results of a comparative
study of corpora gathered from newspaper articles on the 2010
Polish Air Force TU-154 crash in Smolensk, Russia. We
investigated the main concepts around which the narrative
structure of the articles was built using the text network
analysis. For the analysis we gathered articles from two
mainstream Polish newspapers, Gazeta Wyborcza and Nasz
Dziennik, and transformed the texts from the resulting corpora
into corresponding graphs. Each graph consisted of nodes based
on the words included in the text, and edges between the nodes
based on the proximity relations between the words. Resulting
graphs were then filtered to show the most important nodes,
which acted as junctions for meaning circulation in the texts.
After comparing the graphs from both corpora we found that
the articles from Gazeta Wyborcza focused more on the aspects
of Polish-Russian dialog, while articles from Nasz Dziennik
focused on the national aspects of the tragedy. These findings
show that the text network analysis can be successfully used as
an alternative to other statistical corpus methods for discourse
analysis.
Index Terms—2010 polish air force TU-154 crash,
quantitative corpus analysis, Smolensk catastrophe, text
network analysis.
The authors are with the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University,
Poznan, Poland (e-mail: mgruszecka@wa.amu.edu.pl,
mpikusa@wa.amu.edu.pl).
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Cite: Marta Gruszecka and Michal Pikusa, " Using Text Network Analysis in Corpus Studies — A
Comparative Study on the 2010 TU-154 Polish Air Force
Presidential Plane Crash Newspaper Coverage," International Journal of Social Science and Humanity vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 233-236, 2015.