Using Computer-Assisted Approach to Media Discourse Analysis on the

Construction of City Image: Chengdu Park City as an Example

Jing Liu

College of International Education, Chengdu Polytechnic,

No.83, Tianyi Street, Hi-tech Zone District, Chengdu, Sichuan, China

Keywords: Computer-Assisted, Corpus Linguistic Approach, News Media Coverage, International Communication

Reports, Discursive Construction, City Image.

Abstract: This study uses a computer-assisted corpus linguistic approach to analyzing news media coverage of Chengdu

Park City for international communication. With a dataset of 60,080 word tokens of foreign-oriented news

articles on the Park City of Chengdu, the study demonstrates how embedded computational techniques in

corpus linguistic software can aid the quantitative analysis with reference to collocations, frequency and

keyness, as well as qualitative analysis based on concordance lines and lexical networks. Taking Chengdu as

an example, this study suggests a framework for adopting computer-powered statistical measures in analyzing

the discursive construction of a city’s image by pinpointing linguistic patterns of datasets, mainly in terms of

collocations, frequencies, key clusters as well as their diachronic development.

1 INTRODUCTION

City image is the sum of beliefs, ideas, and

impressions that people have of a city (Kotler,

Gertner, 2022). In reality, except for a small number

of people who can directly see and feel a city, most

of the international public has to imagine the city

through mass media. The narratives of media thus

play a significant role in agenda setting and framing

the public’s cognition of city image (Ke, Chen, Yu,

2012). The city image, under the scope of

communication studies, has transcended such

physical objects as geography, scenery, landscape to

capture the mental conception held in common by

those who are exposed to the reality constructed by

mass media. The city of Chengdu boasts an affluent

agricultural region and has long been known as the

Land of Abundance. Such an impression is so

ingrained all around the world that drastic changes in

the city image of Chengdu are not discernible to the

general public. In 2018, Chengdu became the first

place where the Park City concept was officially

mentioned in China, and after more than three years

of exploration and practice, the Park City has become

the most distinctive cultural label of the city of

Chengdu. Despite Chengdu’s great strides in building

itself into a Park City, the image of which receives

little recognition, if not at all, from the international

community. Against such a backdrop, the presence of

Park City-related content in Chinese international

communication reports for foreign-oriented publicity

has increased over the past three years. According to

Fairclough, discourses not only represent the world as

it is (or rather is seen to be), they are also projective,

imaginaries, representing possible worlds which are

different from the actual world, and tied into projects

to change the world in particular directions

(Fairclough 2003). In this sense, international

communication reports on Park City not only reflect

but also construct the image of Chengdu, making it

visible to the international community. No studies so

far have probed into the discursive construction of

Chengdu Park City in media reports. Given that, this

study aims to analyze how Chengdu has attempted to

discursively construct itself as a Park City and the

effects of which on the construction of Chengdu Park

City per se.

208

Liu, J.

Using Computer-Assisted Approach to Media Discourse Analysis on the Construction of City Image: Chengdu Park City as an Example.

DOI: 10.5220/0011909200003613

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on New Media Development and Modernized Education (NMDME 2022), pages 208-214

ISBN: 978-989-758-630-9

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

2 METHODOLOGY

Lexical items ranging from word tokens to multi-

word phrases are prone to carry discoursal traces.

Nevertheless, only when linguistic elements are

categorized into patterns can discoursal phenomena

be identified and interpreted. Patterns come with

relatively large datasets which require computational

methods to process for efficiency’s sake. Against the

tide of digital Social Science and Digital Humanities,

digital methods are at disposal of communication

scholars to undertake computer-powered research

into the media discourse. However, the bar is high for

those researchers without relevant technical

expertise. Therefore, this study attempts at an

alternative: combining corpus linguistics and

discourse analysis, i.e., quantitative corpus-based

research is employed to supplement the qualitative

analysis of patterns of the language across texts as

well as the social and cultural contexts. The

advantages of merging corpus-based approaches and

discourse analysis lie in varietal aspects. First, it

reduces the cognitive biases of the researcher; second,

it identifies the incremental effect of discourse

presented in a large number of discourses; third,

corpus linguistics advocates triangulation, in other

words, utilization of multiple research methods and

different forms of data to help check the validity of

hypotheses and provide more robust interpretations

and explanations to support the research results

(Baker 2004). Corpus linguistics software tools have

in-built statistical measures for automatic

computation and thus are easy to use from a technical

perspective.

3 RESEARCH DESIGN

3.1 Research Data

We retrieve our articles from the digital database

Nexis Uni with “Chengdu Park City” or “Chengdu

Garden City” as search terms, resulting in 185 texts

spanning February 2018 to August 2021 and the

former was the date when President Xi Jinping

introduced the term Park City on a visit to Chengdu.

Having been manually screened to remove duplicate

texts, foreign media reports, and the news that merely

mentioned Chengdu Park City without relevant

contents, the corpus is reduced to 69 texts (60,080

word tokens), including reports in English published

by China’s media outlets, as well as the English

version of press releases issued by Chengdu’s

companies and organizations via foreign media

channels.

3.2 Corpus Linguistic Software

Albeit the benefits discourse analysis can reap from

computational assistance, the barrier remains high for

scholars who lack programming expertise. In this

study, we use corpus linguistic software called

#LancsBox and it is a new-generation software

package for the analysis of language data and corpora

developed at Lancaster University. There are five

modules in #LancsBox: KWIC, Whelk, GraphColl,

Words and Text. First, KWIC generates concordance

lines sorted alphabetically according to the

surrounding text on the left or right. Second, Whelk

shows the distribution of the search term across

corpus files. Then, GraphColl identifies and builds

visual networks of linguistic collocations. It is worth

pointing out that GraphColl provides varietal

statistical choices to identify collocations since there

are no one definite sets of collocates. Next, The

Words tool compiles frequency and/or keyword lists

in terms of types, lemmas and POS categories. Last

but not least, the Text tool enables in-depth analysis

on the context of a search term. Given the above

computer-aided functionalities,

#LancsBox can be

used for a combination of automated quantitative

research (Whelk, GraphColl, Words) and qualitative

research (KWIC, Text). The remainder of this article

will demonstrate how communications researchers

can harness the power of #LancsBox to conduct

media discourse analysis and a potential workflow in

this regard.

3.3 Workflow

3.3.1 Collocation Analysis

In this corpus-based study, Park or Garden is set as

the node, and the span is set as 5 words to the left and

5 to the right. MI score is a measure of collocational

strength, and a MI score of 3 or higher is proposed to

be taken as evidence that two items are collocates

(Hunston 2002). However, MI Score is affected

strongly by frequency, and low-frequency words tend

to reach a high MI score. To avoid such limitations, I

also consider words with T-score of 2 or higher since

which is normally considered to be statistically

significant (McEnery, Xiao, Tono, 2006). This study

draws on both cut-off points above mentioned as the

benchmark for identifying statistically significant

collocates.

Using Computer-Assisted Approach to Media Discourse Analysis on the Construction of City Image: Chengdu Park City as an Example

209

Table 1. Statistically Significant Collocates of Park or Garden

Node word Collocate Freq. Joint freq. MI T-score

park

garden

(total freq.441)

sino-french 32 20 6.42 4.42

jincheng 17 10 6.34 3.12

livable 41 24 6.33 4.84

forest 28 16 6.29 3.95

science 46 21 5.97 4.51

mountain 32 14 5.91 3.68

beautiful 60 26 5.90 5.01

high-tech 53 22 5.83 4.61

agriculture 53 19 5.62 4.27

concept 59 21 5.61 4.49

agricultural 74 21 5.28 4.47

bureau 47 12 5.13 3.37

central 52 12 4.99 3.35

technology 94 20 4.87 4.32

revitalization 49 10 4.81 3.05

airport 63 11 4.58 3.18

cultural 145 24 4.51 4.68

industry 154 25 4.48 4.78

rural 81 12 4.35 3.29

first 124 18 4.32 4.03

tianfu 333 48 4.31 6.58

urban 200 26 4.16 4.81

lake 85 11 4.15 3.13

industrial 141 17 4.05 3.87

ecological 136 16 4.01 3.75

innovation 100 11 3.92 3.10

greenway 113 12 3.87 3.23

area 464 48 3.83 6.44

development 436 39 3.62 5.74

green 137 12 3.59 3.18

new 659 54 3.49 6.70

international 282 19 3.21 3.89

As is shown in Table 1, among the collocates,

tianfu, new, area stand out and the three of them

reveal in partnership the strategic position of Tianfu

New Area. In February 2018, General Secretary Xi

Jinping stated during his visit to Tianfu New Area that

it is an important node for the Belt and Road initiative

and the development of the Yangtze River Economic

Belt, and it must be planned and built well, in

particular, special attention should be paid to

highlight the characteristics of Park City and

ecological value should be taken into consideration so

as to create new growth poles and build inland open

economic highlands. And then, the word first

indicates that Tianfu New Area is the starting point of

the Park City discourse.

Also on the list are development and concept

which point to the New Development Philosophy the

Park City initiative adheres to; innovation, green, and

ecological are indicative of Chengdu’s being

innovative and green while seeking Park City

development; as for the aboutness of international, I

explore its collocational network for further evidence.

As can be seen from Figure 1, the construction of Park

City in the new era focuses on creating an open

international environment where Chengdu spreads to

the world the development concept of opening up via

cooperation and exchanges in domains such as trade,

art, and sports.

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Figure 1 The collocational network of international

In addition, rural and urban are ranked similarly

in Table 1 and such similarity in collocational

strength indicates that Chengdu emphasizes

coordinated urban-rural development while

attempting to build a Park City. Also noteworthy is

that beautiful and livable are ranked third and seventh

respectively in Table 1, and the reason why they are

both highly ranked is that Chengdu has pinpointed its

strategic positioning as a beautiful and livable Park

City.

To fully interpret the computed collocates above

mentioned, the context relevant to Park City

discourse has to be taken into consideration.

Retrospectively, at the Fifth Plenary Session of the

18th CPC Central Committee, the New Development

Philosophy featuring innovation, coordination, green

shift, open and shared development, was put forward

for the first time. Then, at the Fifth Plenary Session

of the 19th CPC Central Committee, it was explicitly

required that the New Development Philosophy be

implemented on all fronts.

Based on the above collocational analysis, it can

be noted that the New Development Philosophy has

permeated the Park City discourse and such

philosophy has been collocationally realized in

textual data with different representations.

3.3.2 Key Clusters Analysis

In order to investigate the diachronic changes in Park

City discourse, I divide the corpus into three

subcorpora by time: 2018, 2019, and 2020-2021 and

merge the data of 2020 and 2021 into one subcorpus

since there are only two relevant reports from 2021 at

the time of data collection. Statistically, the sizes of

the three subcorpora are 17,277 tokens, 26,216 tokens

and 14,477 tokens respectively.

Keywords are items of unusual frequency in

comparison with a reference of some suitable kind

(Scott, Tribble, 2006). There is a significant

difference in the frequency of occurrence of

keywords in the study corpus compared with the

reference corpus, i.e., the frequency in the former is

significantly higher or lower than that in the latter.

The reference corpus used in this study is the news

subcorpora of Crown and Clob (Xu, Liang, 2013),

which was co-built in 2012 by Professors Xu Jiajin

and Liang Maocheng of The National Research

Centre for Foreign Language Education (NRCFLE)

attached to Beijing Foreign Studies University. An

examination of the keywords that occur when two

corpora are compared together should reveal the most

significant lexical differences between them, in terms

of aboutness and style (Baker 2006). Compared with

individual keywords, key clusters are more

informative as indicators of the aboutness of

discourses. Thus, in this study, I focus on the top 10

five-word key clusters, as shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Key Clusters Related to Chengdu Park City

Key Clusters

2018

Keyness

Frequenc

Key Clusters

2019

Keyness

Frequen

Key

Clusters

2020-21

Keynes

Freque

ncy

agricultural

science and

technology

park

12.00 19

internet

audio &

video

industry

4.38 9

summer

world

university

games of

Chengdu

5.15 6

sino-french

agricultural

science and

technology

12.00 19

the belt and

road

initiative

4.38 9

2020 sino-

european

new

economic

online

4.45 5

Using Computer-Assisted Approach to Media Discourse Analysis on the Construction of City Image: Chengdu Park City as an Example

211

the sino-

french

agricultural

science and

7.95 12

of wangcong

tianfu

cultural

industry

4.00 8

Chengdu

new

economic

developmen

commission

4.45 5

the belt and

road initiative

6.20 9

overall

planning and

core area

4.00 8

issued the

following

news release

4.45 5

the park city

construction

bureau

5.05 7

wangcong

tianfu

cultural

industry park

4.00 8

the Chengdu

new

economic

developmen

4.45 5

between

Sichuan

province and

France

4.47 6

Chengdu

douban red

international

carnival

3.63 7

world

university

games

Chengdu

2021

4.45 5

science and

technology

roject

4.47 6

planning and

core area

conceptual

3.63 7

base of giant

panda

reeding

3.76 4

a beautiful and

livable park

3.89 5

the overall

planning and

core

3.63 7

Chengdu

research

ase of

iant

3.76 4

beautiful and

livable park

city

3.89 5

and core area

conceptual

scheme

3.25 6

new

economic

online

cooperation

conference

3.76 4

belt and road

initiative and

3.89 5

chengdu

municipal

bureau of

commerce

3.25 6

research

base of giant

panda

3.76 4

As is shown in Table 2, key clusters in the three

time periods are both independent and related if

taking into account the Park City discourse as a

whole: the belt and road initiative indicates that the

development of Park City in Chengdu has been

deeply integrated into China’s belt and road initiative;

internet audio & video industry and the Chengdu new

economic development imply that the Park City

initiative gives Chengdu momentum to attempting a

new paradigm for the economic development;

agricultural science and technology park, sino-french

agricultural science, sino-european new economic

online, wangcong tianfu cultural industry park, base

of giant panda breeding, summer world university

games, douban red international carnival are all

unarguable evidences that Park City project

coordinates the development in science and

technology, international cooperation, culture,

agriculture, ecology, as well as sports and music, the

joint efforts of which lead Chengdu to a sustainable

and all-round urban development.

3.3.3 Concordance Analysis

Then, while analyzed across time, the cooccurrence

of 5-word key clusters within the same time span

uncovers the sociohistorical contexts and primary

concerns of that specific period. Through the top 10

key clusters in 2018, it can be noted that the lexical

clusters related to Agricultural Science and

Technology Park occur four times, i.e., agricultural

science and technology park, sino-french agricultural

science and technology, the sino-french agricultural

science, science and technology park project.

Background research shows that the Sino-French

Agricultural Science and Technology Park covers an

area of 18 square kilometers with a total planned

investment of about 30 billion yuan. It was listed in

the 2015 Global Climate Summit Plan and also as one

of the 100 key projects in Sichuan Province in 2018.

Below is the expanded version of a concordance line

with Sino-French Agricultural Science and

Technology Park being its node.

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Extract (1): Sichuan Province, having been

working in the spirit of General Secretary Xi Jinping,

launched the Sino-French Agricultural Science and

Technology Park Project, in order to carry out the

strategy of park city for practical results.

Saliently, this extract argues that the Sino-French

Agricultural Science and Technology Park is a solid

example of turning the Park City vision into action

and it sets a model for international cooperation in

constructing the Park City.

Moving forward to 2019, it is evident from Table

2 that 6 out of the top 10 key clusters relate to

Wangcong Tianfu Cultural Industry Park, i.e., of

wangcong tianfu cultural industry, wangcong tianfu

cultural industry park, overall planning and core

area, planning and core area conceptual, the overall

planning and core, core area conceptual scheme. The

reason why lexical words related to Wangcong Tianfu

Cultural Industry Park repeatedly occur in the 2019

Park City discourse is that the project solicited

international consultation on the overall planning and

core area conceptual scheme design at its preparation

stage. As such, it spreads around the world the Park

City concept as demonstrated in the following extract:

Extract (2) Wangcong Tianfu Cultural Industry

Park is a key carrier for the district to create a world-

renowned cultural and creative city and a central

urban area of the park city that embodies the new

development concept in an all-round way.

In the same vein, I also note that lexical words

related to new economic development show marked

frequency in the 2020-2021 Park City discourse, i.e.,

new economy online, new economic development, and

new economic online cooperation. This can be

explained by the influence on the city of Chengdu of

the 2020 Sino-European New Economic Online

Cooperation Conference hosted by the Chengdu new

economic development commission. Taking into

account the Dual Circulation development pattern

and the normalization of epidemic prevention and

control in China, this virtual conference reflects

Chengdu’s efforts in seeking alternative economic

approaches to building a Park City. As is shown in the

example below, Chengdu has been exploring novel

ways to organically combine Park City construction

and new economic development in a bid to build a

more harmonious urban space featuring sustained

economic development.

Extract (3) Building a so-called island for

unicorns... is another ambitious initiative of the city

to develop the new economy. To help advance the

cause of the unicorn hub, the Chengdu government is

seeking solutions to planning, building, and

managing models for the balanced development of

industries, people, and nature in the garden city.

A diachronic analysis of key clusters helps map

out the actions Chengdu has taken to implement the

Park City initiative. From the above analysis, I can

construe that Park City is discursively represented as

a project carried out in a multitiered, phased, and

focused manner, and in turn, the discursive function

of Park City has been cumulatively enhanced as time

proceeds.

4 ANALYSIS

In conclusion, this study draws on the methodological

synergy of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis

to explore how the Park City image is discursively

constructed in international communication reports. I

find, in a holistic view, Park City has been

discursively represented as being a beautiful and

livable city with humans at the center and with New

Development Philosophy as guidelines. In sum, the

discursive construction of Park City exhibits the

following three features.

First, the discursive construction of Park City in

international communication reports is a dynamic

process, demonstrably being socially shaped as well

as socially constitutive. Ever since the Park City

initiative began in February 2018, Chengdu has been

implementing the rural vitalization strategy and

exploring the representation of Park City in rural

Chengdu by establishing projects like the Sino-

French Agricultural Science and Technology Park;

with the release of the Three-Year Action Plan for the

Construction of Three Cities and Three Capitals in

Chengdu (Official Website of Chengdu Municipal

People’s Government, 2019), Chengdu has witnessed

the building of Wangcong Tianfu Cultural Industrial

Park imbued with ancient Shu culture; currently,

under the combined impact of worldwide changes of

a scale unseen in a century and the global coronavirus

pandemic, Chengdu proactively develops the new

economy to create positive momentum for Park City

construction. To reiterate, the discursive construction

of Park City at different periods is always amenable

to social contexts and keeps abreast of China’s

development needs.

Second, the discursive construction of Park City

in international communication reports features

dialectical relations. On the one hand, the Park City

discourses are representations of Park City practices

that adhere to the New Development Philosophy and

ensure harmony between humanity and nature. On the

other hand, such representations enter and shape Park

Using Computer-Assisted Approach to Media Discourse Analysis on the Construction of City Image: Chengdu Park City as an Example

213

City construction practices, leading to the

establishment of such major ecological projects as

Longquanshan Forest Park, Tianfu Greenway

System, Jincheng Park, Sino-French Agricultural

Science, and Technology Park, Chengdu Agricultural

Highland Park, Airport Central Park, Wangcong

Tianfu Cultural Industrial Park, etc.

Third, the discursive construction of Park City in

international communication reports is an enactment

of our country’s mainstream ideology. As stated by

Teun A. van Dijk, discourse plays a prominent role as

the preferential site for the explicit, verbal

formulation and the persuasive communication of

ideological propositions (VanDijk 1995). In Park

City media discourse, the New Development

Philosophy has been expressed and reproduced in the

context of the mass media. Conversely, such

ideologically shaped media discourse may, in turn,

affect the cognitive representations of the Park City

of Chengdu on the part of the recipients.

5 CONCLUSION

In this study, I employ computer-assisted corpus

linguistics analysis to examine the construction of

Chengdu’s city image in media reports for

international communication. With the specific

research question determined a priori, the workflow

proceeds in a top-down manner, i.e., the data research

starts with collocation analysis to frequency of key

clusters for quantitative statistics and then lexical

network graphs and concordance lines follow up to

aid in the manual, qualitative analysis. Such an

approach is an attempt at harnessing the synergy of

computational technology and discourse analysis.

Since communications research usually involves

hundreds of thousands of texts, the methodological

framework of this study can inform other research

projects associated with discursive construction and

communication of a city’s image. At the same time, it

would be desirable to further examine the extent to

which computer-assisted corpus linguistic programs

are able to contribute to media discourse analysis.

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