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Community and authority in ROAR Magazine

Humanities

Community and authority in ROAR Magazine

J. Buts

Explore how internet-based data from ROAR Magazine challenges critiques of corpus-based studies by revealing cultural aspects through textual patterns and community identity formation. This intriguing research, conducted by Jan Buts, illuminates the complexities of narrative construction in a fragmented online world.

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Playback language: English
Introduction
The study grounds itself in the linguistic tradition of contextualizing meaning, tracing it from Malinowski's ethnographic work emphasizing context to Firth's contextual theory and Sinclair's corpus linguistics. While corpus linguistics initially aimed for contextual meaning, it faced criticism for decontextualization. The paper counters this by examining online communities where shared symbols, like internet memes, foster belonging despite spatial and temporal fragmentation. The study focuses on ROAR Magazine, an online political journal covering global protests since 2011, using a corpus of 100 articles to analyze how it builds community and authority.
Literature Review
The paper reviews existing literature on community formation, drawing on Anderson's concept of imagined communities, McMillan and Chavis's elements of sense of community (membership, influence, needs fulfillment, shared emotional connection), and the adaptation of these concepts to virtual communities. It also explores the role of keywords and their contested meanings in political discourse, referencing Williams's work on keywords and the concept of "essentially contested concepts" as per Gallie. The role of quotation, particularly in online environments and its contribution to ethos (building speaker credibility and community connection) according to Atkins and Finlayson, is also discussed.
Methodology
The study employs corpus linguistics methods, analyzing a subcorpus of 100 articles from ROAR Magazine (from the Genealogies of Knowledge corpus) totaling 276,851 tokens. The analysis focuses on the keyword "democracy" and its collocates to understand the magazine's self-representation. Concordance lines are examined to reveal patterns of adjective use with "democracy," highlighting the interplay of terms like "direct," "participatory," "real," and "representative." The study further investigates quotation practices, examining the frequency of proper names (Bookchin, Öcalan, Trump, Marx) and the context of their use to reveal patterns of authority and community building. The analysis leverages the Genealogies suite of software tools for concordance generation and visualization (using the Mosaic plugin). Metadata such as author information is also employed.
Key Findings
The analysis reveals that the keyword "democracy" and its frequent modifiers (direct, participatory, real, radical) signify a specific vision of democracy within ROAR's community. The study shows how frequent references to, and quotations from, figures like Murray Bookchin and Abdullah Öcalan contribute to a shared theoretical framework and establish intellectual authority. The frequent but unquoted mention of Donald Trump serves to establish him as a negative archetype in the magazine's narrative, contrasting him with figures embodying positive revolutionary values. The use of Marx's vocabulary, often ironically, functions to build community and create a shared poetic language, while Bookchin's theoretical framework is meticulously presented and analyzed. The study highlights how these interwoven references and quotations create a shared mythology, solidifying the community's identity and shaping the narrative presented in the magazine. ROAR's crowdfunding model on Patreon, with its playful use of revolutionary terminology, further reinforces the community identity, albeit with potential for internal tensions.
Discussion
The findings demonstrate that corpus-based methods can effectively reveal contextual meaning even in fragmented online texts. The study shows how ROAR constructs its online identity and community by weaving together a complex network of references, quotations, and a shared mythology centered on key figures and concepts. The strategic use of quotations and the construction of a specific narrative shape the reader's understanding of events, sometimes overriding the complexities of real-world relationships. This highlights the potential for selective storytelling within virtual communities. The study’s focus on ROAR’s specific context contrasts with criticisms of corpus linguistics’ decontextualized nature.
Conclusion
The study successfully demonstrates that corpus linguistics can be used to illuminate the cultural constitution of online media. ROAR Magazine’s use of keywords, quotations, and a carefully constructed mythology effectively builds a sense of virtual community, albeit one with potential internal conflicts. Future research could explore the evolution of this community over time, examine other online political journals to assess the generalizability of the findings, and delve into the interplay between online and offline activism within the ROAR community.
Limitations
The study's sample of 100 articles, while providing rich contextual data, may not be fully representative of the entire body of ROAR's publications. The focus on specific keywords and authors might overlook other significant textual patterns and narratives within the magazine's content. The reliance on a specific corpus-analysis tool and its limitations (e.g., inability to search for punctuation) may influence the scope of the findings.
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