Mapping Digital Discourses of the Capital Region of Finland : Combining Onomastics, CADS, and GIS
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 topo…
Geographic imagination and urban-rural binary in online discourses related to the capital region of Finland : A corpus onomastic study of Helsinki, Vantaa and Espoo
The article focuses on digital discourses related to Helsinki, Espoo and Vantaa, the three biggest municipalities in Finland’s capital region. The data consist of texts from the discussion forum of Suomi24 that was analysed to find out how forum users produce socio-spatial distinctions by categorizing some groups as ‘others’ thus differentiating in-groups and out-groups. The analysis used methods of comprised corpus assisted discourse studies (CADS), including collocation analysis. The results show that discourses related both to native and non-native Helsinkians and to those living in the capital region in contrast to those living elsewhere in Finland are common and the juxtapositions betw…