Abstract
This chapter examines a particular form of presence and absence, namely, that of the mention and failure to mention in political and media news reporting of messages relating to a particular historical event, namely, the outbreak of protest in the Arab Middle East and North Africa in 2011. The analyses will take a ‘before and after’ contrastive approach, comparing how particular political and media sources talked about events and people involved in the period before the start of the protests and in the period following the outbreak of the protests. The overarching preliminary research aim is to discover if the discussions changed, if so, how, and, in particular, which messages were present or absent, appeared or disappeared, completely or in relative terms, between the two periods of time. Various sets of data are examined in order to examine three subsidiary research aims contributing to this main one.
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Notes
- 1.
Compiled by Giulia Riccio (2009).
- 2.
Compiled by Anna Marchi, Lancaster and Bologna University. There are arguments both for and against removing reports which are repeated.
- 3.
Compiled by Charlotte Taylor, University of Sussex.
- 4.
The remaining three refer not to Arab Spring protests but to the Israelis and Palestinians.
- 5.
SiBol 13 is part of the SiBol (Siena-Bologna) suite of newspaper corpora. SiBol 13 contains the entire published production in 2013 of 13 English-language newspapers: Guardian, Mail, Mirror, Telegraph, The Times from the UK, the New York Times and Washington Times from the USA, The Times of India, The South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), Daily News Egypt, and Gulf News (UAE).
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Partington, A. (2018). Intimations of ‘Spring’? What Got Said and What Didn’t Get Said about the Start of the Middle Eastern/North African Uprisings: A Corpus-assisted Discourse Study of a Historical Event. In: Schröter, M., Taylor, C. (eds) Exploring Silence and Absence in Discourse. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64580-3_4
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