In 2019 I wrote a submission to the Public Inquiry into the Earthquake Commission (EQC) on behalf of the UC Arts Digital Lab. This involved building and analysing a corpus of 112 million words of articles from The Press (2010-2019). The analysis quantified EQC coverage over time, comparing this to the visibility of other organisations and keywords related to the period after the Canterbury and Christchurch earthquakes on 2010 and 2011. I applied collocation analysis to identify words predictably associated with EQC, including negative terms related to EQC repairs (e.g. “botched”, “defective”, “poor”, “shoddy”, “unconsented”, “substandard”) reflecting public reports of poor quality repairs that were featured in Press reporting as early as January 2012.
Skills & Tools: Corpus construction; Data wrangling; Python; Corpus-assisted discourse analysis; Data visualisation.