Investigating Risk, Uncertainty and Normativity Within the Framework of Digital Discourse Analysis: Renewable Energies in Climate Change Discourse

This chapter introduces Digital Discourse Analysis as an approach to the understanding of risk in public media coverage. We focus not only on the meaning of individual expressions like risk but also on the conceptual network in which the ‘risk’ concept is embedded. We illustrate the investigation process of Digital Discourse Analysis by the example of renewable energies in climate change discourse in Germany and Britain and show how the notions of risk and uncertainty influence the conceptual framing of individual energy technologies in media texts. Drawing up a frame model which assigns objects cognitively and linguistically to an ordered set of predicates, we apply linguistic standard tools such as concordancing and keyword analysis and combine them with semantically driven manual categorisation of lexical items.