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 this paper I wish to examine 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 sort of ‘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 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 what 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 (listed in the Introduction) contributing to this main one.