Mapping Digital Discourses of the Capital Region of Finland

Abstract

This article discusses the three Finnish city names Helsinki, Espoo, and Vantaa, and the urban discourses that surround them. The study reveals patterns of socio-spatial differentiation by examining what meanings people attach to these capital region cities and investigating how these meanings are expressed in online discourses. Using the methodological approach of corpus-assisted onomastics (CAO), this study incorporates onomastics, geographical information systems (GIS), and corpus linguistics. This interdisciplinary research also examines how corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) and GIS can be combined to reveal and visualize the contextual information and discursive patterns of toponyms. For this investigation, a data set of 2.7 billion words was collected from the Suomi24 Corpus, one of the biggest discussion fora in Finland. The use of social media corpus as a data source increases the authenticity of this research, as the data was not collected specifically for this study. The analysis reveals that the most frequent digital discourses about the cities refer to places and directions, housing, and mobility. The occurrences differ quantitatively and qualitatively between each city. This paper paves the way for future onomastic studies to research actual name usage using this new methodology. Knowledge gained from such research may not only enrich the field of onomastics, but also facilitate more socially sustainable urban planning.

Geographic imagination and urban-rural binary in online discourses related to the capital region of Finland

“…Although the demonym keywords are clearly associated with Helsinki data (Jantunen et al 2022), this does not mean that they do not exist in the contexts of Espoo and Vantaa. To the present study, four demonyms were taken into account.…”

“…Keywords are words that are statistically more frequent in the research data in comparison with the reference data (Scott & Tribble 2006:58-59). For the calculation of keywords in Jantunen et al (2022), we used the Keyword List program in the AntConc corpus toolkit (Anthony 2017), the Log-Likelihood test as the statistical measure (Rayson & Garside 2000) and a threshold 50 for occurrences to eliminate noise which may result from the repetition of identical postings. After this, the data were explored using qualitative close reading (cf.…”

“…After this, the data were explored using qualitative close reading (cf. Mautner 2009); the results of this phase were reported in Jantunen et al (2022). In their study, the 300 most significant keywords were grouped into discourse prosodies, i.e.…”

“…The discourse prosodies help us to shed light on the prevalent discourses that surround each city in the discussion. 'People' was one of the discourse prosody classes in Jantunen et al (2022), and for the purpose of the present study, the keywords belonging to this discourse prosody were analysed more thoroughly and divided into sub-categories according to the co-textual meaning. The following analysis will concentrate on one of these sub-categories, namely demonyms, i.e.…”

“…corpora, are utilized as data, where analysis is based on corpus research methods (such as wordlist analysis, concordance and collocation analysis) and where the subject of the research is the prevalence of names, their usage in textual contexts (e.g. in collocations and other phraseological relations, and genres), as well as regional and local variation (Jantunen et al 2022).…”