Tracking, exploring and analyzing recent developments in German-language online press in the face of the coronavirus crisis: cOWIDplus Analysis and cOWIDplus Viewer

TL;DR

This paper introduces three interconnected resources to analyze the impact of the coronavirus crisis on German-language online press, including a newsfeed corpus, a vocabulary diversity tracker, and an interactive exploration web app.

Contribution

It provides novel tools and datasets for analyzing language changes in German online news during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Findings

The RSS corpus contains extensive German newsfeed data.

Vocabulary diversity has changed over the pandemic period.

The web app enables accessible exploration of language effects.

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic may be the largest crisis the world has had to face since World War II. It does not come as a surprise that it is also having an impact on language as our primary communication tool. We present three inter-connected resources that are designed to capture and illustrate these effects on a subset of the German language: An RSS corpus of German-language newsfeeds (with freely available untruncated unigram frequency lists), a static but continuously updated HTML page tracking the diversity of the used vocabulary and a web application that enables other researchers and the broader public to explore these effects without any or with little knowledge of corpus representation/exploration or statistical analyses.