This paper presents a collective work based on a collaboration between researchers from various fields in Lyons University (France) : Media Studies, Gender Studies, linguistics and Computer Science.
The controversies about gender in the French public space are nowadays very vehement. Several key terms (like Gender, Family, Nature, "Parité", Feminism) are constantly reframed by political groups from far-right parties on one side, and by feminist activists on the other side. The official definitions of those terms then remain very fuzzy and very hard to grasp.
Those conflicts in reframing are particularly evident in online commentaries and online discourses, on newspaper sites, political sites and online media, but those commentaries are quite difficult to gather and the heterogeneity of this discourse make it difficult to analyze. It is especially difficult to identify where the reframing comes from.
My colleagues and I have collectively analyzed the online articles and commentaries from online newspapers, feminist blogs, far-right sites and Twitter accounts dealing with the demonstration that took place in Paris on October 5th, 2014 : "La manif pour tous", which was explicitly organized against Gender Studies. This work will have been discussed with colleagues from linguistics, political science and gender studies during a conference we organize in Lyons, in November, 27-18th, 2014, about "Gender Controversies and Opinion Mining".
Our aim is to build a new methodology able to gather data about those topics (using the tools of databases building and opinion mining), and to analyze them via quantitative and qualitative tools, like lexicometry, to compare the variation in the reframing of the terms dealing with topics about family. This way, we hope we could give a complete methodology about the analysis of online gender controversies, and about other controversies in general.
